A new appreciation for my mother
I was walking the dogs this morning and ran into a friend, a talented artist, and she was asking me about Tin. I said he is fabulous, beyond wonderful. I told her that he gives me a new understanding of my mother and she repeated, having two children of her own, the old adage, that you don’t know until you have one what it’s like to be a mother. And she’s right. When I think that my mother was barely 20 years old when she met my father and married him, and inherited four sons, and then had two daughters before she was 23 years old meaning that she had six kids by 25, it’s insane.
My friend said just the fact that my mother and her oldest child were 12 years apart was astounding. “Imagine trying to be an authority figure in that situation?”
It just sinks my heart, my poor beautiful mother, so young, so trapped! OMG. It’s hard to imagine.
I was reading through some letters we had sent back and forth while I was in California. In the early 90’s, mom and I had a rift as I vehemently endorsed my independence and her culpability into everything that was wrong with the world. Good grief. If I could go back in time and slap myself, I would.
What was in my mother’s mind? So young, so beautiful, and so naive as she traveled to New Orleans and married a Cuban Jew and was swept off to live in Havana during a time when the island was hot hot hot! Ay yi yi – the tales she had to tell. Like being pregnant with me out to here, and seeing the 14 year old gum smacking guerillas come to get Batista’s bodyguard on the next floor up as he paced with his giant German Shepherd back and forth.
I know my mom is looking down and smiling now as I care for Tin. She wouldn’t be saying, “Uh huh, you see!” that wasn’t her style, she’s saying, “Enjoy it honey, it goes by so fast.”
