On Mother’s Day, we get our mother a card. Those of us with a real job and extra money get flowers or a present or take her to lunch or send her to a spa. Sure I did that. But usually my mother was first. You see, every year that I lived in Los Angeles, and that has been quite a few, my mother sent me a Mother’s Day card. Not because I’m a mother, and truly my greatest regret is that I’m not, but because I made her a mother. And nothing made her more proud than being a mother.

They say we become our mother. I never saw myself as like my mother though, not that that was a bad thing to be, it’s just she was so much more still than I was.  Or so I thought.  My mother was beautiful … beautiful in an uncommon way, and her beauty was especially uncommon because she never used it. My mother never aged. Well she did, but not that much, not in that way most people do. She had very dark hair, darker skin too, all set against her pale grey-blue eyes. When I was younger, when people would invariably say I looked like my father, I used to wish people would say I looked like her. Sometimes I would tell my mother that, and she would tell me that I looked like her, but she would qualify it by saying what parts of my father I resemble: “you have his hair, his eyes, his forehead… his personality, his temperament”, compliments no doubt, but oh how I wanted to be treated like her. Her treatment: she was a star in her original birthplace of East Texas. I have family there, still. Most of them are the brothers and sisters of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. They have this amazing longevity; some of them are still with us, many past the century mark. And beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe these people, not because of their looks, my mother’s physical beauty was quite unique, but in their spirit, in their love. And they love me, as they loved my mother, this thing I don’t understand, I just feel. Last year, in March (2013) I drove to Texas in my then-car, the leased Mini. I tend to spend most of my time in Dallas where I was raised, but one day my brother and I drove from Dallas to East Texas to the little 2000-person town my mother is originally from, indeed I am originally from, the town nearest the place where my mother lays rest. When in East Texas, we went to the farm that was the childhood home of my mother’s mother, now owned by my mother’s uncle, himself the youngest of eight and only a few years older than my mother would have been. He’s interesting, a capable man who’s working on inventing windmills and drilling water wells…. Still. On this land, he is storing my equipment that I have so much time, money and energy invested in — equipment I had then seen only in pictures.

I’ve been to that farm before, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even 20 the last time I was there. I remembered it though; places like that comes with stories so vivid, stories that are retold for decades. I remember, when I was younger and visited, how all the people would talk to my mother. They would ask her about Dallas, about how it was she wasn’t afraid of the “crime” there, about how afraid they are to drive there, about how big it is now. They would look at her in this way of intent admiration. Occasionally, one would say how all the town’s people around thought of her as the star of that county when she was young. They always talked about how beautiful she was, how beautiful she remained, as if they were so proud that this family could produce her. And she was treated like the most innocent little girl who needed to be protected her entire life. After all, she left the little town for the big city of Dallas, you know… that city with so much crime and traffic and urban sprawl? Yet, I saw her quiet moments. She had issues with the country; she had these memories of the farm where her mother was raised and wanted to get as far away from that life as she could get. And I say that, but she never really got that far away. She built a house in that little near-by town for her mother, a house her mother would make the payments for, and it was always a place we all would go for comfort when the cold city-world got tiring, a house we still have. My mother worked. She always did. She was not educated, but took college classes to learn skills; she got on-the job training; she had many jobs in the corporate world, and rose up in knowledge and position, even without being the kind of tough women most of those early corporate women were (and frankly, still are). She was quiet, timid even, but smart. She was a woman of few words, not one to say words like I love you, but the one who has banana nut bread waiting when I get off the plane for a visit, the one who brought me hot chocolate every morning at 5:00 a.m. so getting up at that crazy-early time for dance practice was easier, the one who sacrificed so that I could have things when I was a girl … like my angel mirror. I remember her getting that mirror – a ceramic mirror with two separate ceramic angel figures. The mirror was our neighbor’s at the house in Dallas, the house we lived in in the year or so before we moved for the six-year stint in Canada. That mirror hung over a girl’s vanity table, for sale at the neighbor’s house, and I loved those girly furniture pieces. One day my mother came home with that angel mirror, and I’m willing to bet her lunches were sparse after that because there was no money for angel mirrors. She hung out with me. Every night, literally my entire youth, we would read fashion magazines together, two in particular, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Bazaar was her favorite. I emulated her style, or I tried, but that kind of beauty, her kind, isn’t that easy to emulate. In her later years, what she wanted was to be comfortable at home, at her house in Dallas. She still loved magazines and fashion, but from afar. Instead, she wore comfortable warm-up outfits and took care of the birds gathered in the backyard for the food she would give them. She truly loved those birds.

And then there was my mother’s mother. She was capable. She was from that generation where getting out of high school was a luxury, especially for people from eight-children families raised on cotton farms in East Texas. Decades later, after life on a cotton farm got impossible and she no longer had a husband, she left the cotton farm for the town that is the county-seat. She couldn’t drive. Driving was for men in those days. She walked to work every day, working in a cafe’ waiting tables and serving the men who worked in the nearby oil fields so that she could make the mortgage payments on her house. She was always older in that way people age to “old” starting at age 35. But despite this seemingly always older stature, she was so beautiful on the inside, the kind of beauty that makes someone popular. And popular she was — literally she had an entire county full of friends — so many that her funeral was standing-room-only. Her eyes always smiled. I’ve met few people who were incapable of negative feelings, but honestly she was truly not capable of anything but love. Everything was only positive. I’m not sure she ever understood why her daughter wanted to leave for the Big City of Dallas, but she tried. And perhaps she made up for that by being my cheerleader, in many ways an extra mother. For all the lack of understanding my own mother had for my desire to “make it in the big city of LA”, I mean seriously why would anybody want to leave Dallas, my grandmother was my cheerleader. In her end, she was in the nursing home, but always thought it was just the week before when she left her own precious house, a house with a garden, and flowers and pecan trees and … birds.

Coming full circle to that trip of March, 2013, my brother gave me the grand tour of our equipment, things I have sacrificed so much for, things that I believe will change my life and the lives of everyone around me, equipment stored for free with our great uncle on that farm where my grandmother lived as a girl. We toured the equipment and we played with my great uncle’s donkeys and other farm animals. I had my hair pulled back, hair that is a great deal darker than it was when I was young. I had on a long, trendy t-shirt, leggings, ballet-like shoes and noticeable lip gloss. As I petted the donkeys, I was a bit lost in the feelings I always feel when I go to East Texas, even to the town – the feeling that I am different, a really-big-city girl. I live in Los Angeles – say that with about five syllables for each word and then you’ll hear what I hear when I’m there. That thought – that thought of being so far removed from this place, of being so different from my mother and from her mother before her because of my choices of leaving of educating myself is daunting. I feel like I’m on my own, like there is nobody that will understand. I feel far away. So petting the donkeys is good. I looked over at my great uncle who I realized was watching me. He had this intent look like he was seeing something familiar, something old. I expected him to say something typical, something like I always hear about how I need to come visit more than every few years, about how far away I am, about how scary it must be to live like I do. But he didn’t. Instead he said what I had waited my whole life to hear. He said, simply, “you’re so pretty, you look just like your mother.”

And then I realized it all. I realized I was exactly like my mother, as she is exactly like her own mother. The one overriding similarity: we had these places to go, these lives where we would be, at least for what came before us, pioneers … only it was to be in steps. My grandmother would leave the little cotton farm for the little town. My mother would leave the little town for the nearest real city. I would leave there for the biggest city I can handle. That nature of searching made us the same. And then there is the biggie: love. Each mother loved her daughter in a way that served to be an example. In fact, my mother loved me so much simply for making her a mother, not the normal Hallmark way where I get her a card, but her way, where she gets me one.

Mother’s Day Cards. I would love a card, a Mother’s Day card, from her, but I don’t get that now. And I suppose I can’t be picky because she still sends me things. She’s powerful that way. You see, every month for about three years, I’ve gotten Harper’s Bazaar delivered to my house – the same magazine we used to read together every night. That magazine comes addressed to my mother’s name, without the slightest item of mail addressed to her ever having come to my house. Nobody pays for it. And not satisfied with just one, for the past five months, my mother has been getting Marie Claire magazine at my house too, also for free. I kept wanting an actual Mother’s Day present, almost expecting it. Remember, she’s powerful that way. And in true form, for the last week, I have had a little hummingbird sit right outside the window where I do my work, sometimes one outside my bedroom window too, cheering me on. And that hummingbird sits in a way that hummingbirds don’t sit, still, for a few minutes watching me through the windows, and then leaves. As I sat down to write this, because my mother loved her birds so much, I believed that still and staring hummingbird was my mother’s envoy, but now I don’t know because the bird seem to be a cheerleader, just like my grandmother was. So the magazines with my mother’s name, the hummingbird-cheerleader too, whether it be my mother or my grandmother, I’m pretty sure all of that is to make sure I don’t give up… to make sure this place I’ve built, real and  virtual, this life I’ve built, so far away from that cotton farm, that little town, the city of Dallas, continues, especially as I’ve been so full of doubt, to make sure I know I’m not alone, to make sure I know I have approval, to make sure I know I am loved and watched over by real-life angels.  That’s a pretty cool Mother’s Day card!  Oh and if it is true, if it’s true that we turn into our mothers, and their mother before that? Well… I’m pretty sure I’m okay with that!

 

Oh and my peeps, mostly boys by the way, well my Mama was right…. You celebrate too … because you all had mamas that got your here, no matter where she is, no matter what she was like.   So Happy Mother’s Day, All!