A perfect decoration for a reader/writer. Or an abomination?
Church this morning followed by good intentions to spend the afternoon wrapping presents. Putting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on at the same time distracted me slightly so I only wrapped five and then settled back to watch the rest of the film.
Just in the background to this crib scene you can see the entrance to the Lady Chapel. As a child and teenager I would go to church with my mother, not every week, only now and again, but we always sat in the back row on the left of the Lady Chapel. I'm not sure why because the service was conducted in the main body of the church and I never thought to ask my mother why.
Aslan's resurrection in the film wasn't as good as the one I remember from a BBC series - which I can't find a clip of so perhaps I imagined it.
* * * * *
In All Saints yesterday for the crib exhibition I stopped and spent a few moments remembering.
There were a lot of things I never asked her. Because she worked and then died when I was eighteen I didn't know her very well. We never had mother daughter chats or any sort of chats come to that. The only time she mentioned my father was to show me a photo he was in and say, "He was the only one," as if I might judge her or consider her promiscuous or a bad person. I must have been fourteen at the time and very naive.
So I never asked her about him or how she felt when he abandoned her, or how it was having a baby out of wedlock. Those might have been questions for when I grew up. Or we might never have talked. I'll never know.
I think I have a better - certainly longer - relationship with my children. We all spend time together and alone together and I think we all feel we can talk about anything. I hope so.
9 comments:
That was a poignant comment by your mother. In those days people did make allowance when a relationship was "the only one". She was probably wanting you to know your mother was a decent woman. My own mom died when I was twenty, father soon after. She and I were good friends though, in the short time.
This is a dear story you shared about you and your mom and the things you didn't get to discuss with her. The book tree is similar to a book angel my sister gave me, made from an old hymnal. I think they are beautiful, at a certain point hymnals in churches are replaced for new editions. Thank you for sharing the story about your mom.
It's sad you didn't get the information or answers you needed. My Mom lived to be 95 but there's still a lot about her life that we never talked about. Some days it's just as well, I think, because I'm not sure I would want to know all the painful details. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and I'm happy to be ignorant.
Sad that you didn't get to know your mother better. My mother and I were never close. I wish we had been but it is what it is
Your mother, in her own sad way, informed the better mother that you became. You did well learning from her.
That generation didn’t talk about anything personal, especially where sex was concerned. I discovered my grandmother was pregnant when she and my grandfather went to Boston and married. My mother would be shocked to know that. I discovered it after her death.
My mother also died young. Now there are SO MANY things I wish I could ask her.
It's posts like this that remind me how grateful I am for my parents and my relationships with them. And there's still plenty I'll never know.
Even on the best of times it is challenging to fully know a parent. Their lives prior to “us” was vastly different, and during much of our youth, their prior life is often looked at as “unimportant” by the young compared to their parental self…. which is what we are familiar with.
PipeTobacco
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