Tag: mother-daughter relationships

How To Make The Most Of Your Mothers Genes

Now that I am on the far side of over 50, most of my life is made up of memories and stuff. In the past few weeks after my return from Florida that’s exactly what I’ve been doing – going through stuff that is bringing back memories. If you’re my age you probably either already have done this, or plan to do this in the near future. I’m intending once and for all to let go of physical memories that I can’t carry with me any more. 

 If you’ve been through this please have empathy for me because you know that it’s not easy to get rid of material things that are evidence that you did have a life and lived it and it mattered… at least to you or your mother. Yes, I still even have the things that my mother saved about her life and about the lives of her children while we were growing up.  

I was at that point today where I was so frustrated that I just decided I was going to close my eyes and start dumping all ancient report cards, essays, letters with old stamps on them, birthday cards and pictures of people that I didn’t know when I came upon a small bundle of folded papers secured by a faded blue ribbon. 

What I found on those papers actually broke my heart. You see my mother was one of the most creative beings I have ever known yet, as a woman in the 30s and 40s she was a housewife, always ‘just’ a housewife. She was caretaker of all that she loved and secretly put her creative dreams in a box somewhere for her eyes only.  

Throughout her life Mother’s need for creativity came through her interior decorating in our home and as the years grew and she had more leisure time, she satisfied her creative genes by working on small oil paintings and crocheted so many quilts and scarves for us we didn’t know where to put them. 

That was my mother, or so I thought until I found her secret bundle of papers. I gently opened the yellowed papers and began to read. …”The Little Naked Tree”……as I read on I was finding beautiful stories in rhyme that she had written. They had her signature at the end and her return address beneath. It looked like Mother had possibly submitted these for publication, probably to one of the women’s magazines of the day. Or maybe she wanted to, but never got the courage to follow through with her dreams of being published and most of all, had kept her secret compositions from us.

So as her daughter, a published author and writer, I am giving my mother’s dream life. Here is one of her stories that I have copyright for in her name. This is for you Mother. Thank you for my creative genes.

THE LITTLE NAKED TREE

I am am a little naked tree 

People on their boat pass by 

And make fun of me. 

Here I stand with lovely green trees all around 

Tiny squirrels scamper on the ground.

There a lot of things they don’t know about me. 

I am a friend, companion, too, for a lot of animals that you see.

The fishhawk sits on the very top.

He makes makes a wish 

Then swoops down to catch a fish.

The mother squirrel has made a retreat.

 She stores her food so nice and neat.

 Down near my roots there are some holes.

 Snug and cozy for little moles.

Near the trunk there is a nest.

Mother Robin lays her eggs to rest 

And soon the eggs are hatched out.

Little robins flutter about.

So now you can see, 

Why did they make fun of me?

Just because I am different as can be?

You may have friends who are not like you 

But they may be very nice

And have purpose, too.

So always remember on life’s way 

Be very careful what you do and what you say 

Always be kind and nice to all you see.

They could be just like me

The little naked tree.

V. Atkinson© Sandra Hart© All Rights Reserved.

If I Am Important, You Are Important

If I Am Important Then You Are Important
“I just don’t know …… my grandkids get me, but I can’t understand my son.  He just doesn’t get it.”
And so went the conversation I had about a year ago with a good friend of mine who is about my age and is also a grandmother. She only has one child, a grown man now, a doctor, and somehow he still wants her to be the mother and grandmother of his imagination, even though his mother-in-law, the other grandma, is young enough to to be her daughter. He just can’t accept her flamboyant bangles and bright red lipstick and allow her to be the human being with a kind and giving heart she has always been throughout his life; he evidently never really saw, appreciated, nor thought about his mother as a person until he became successful in his head and had children of his own. 
She told me she feels he sometimes shuts the good things in his life from her, the grandma with the panache and red lipstick his children love. The woman who constantly gave to him, asking little if anything in return now has her nose pressed against the window of his life from the outside while others are welcome to enjoy the good life my friend helped him achieve as a young man.
My final thought to her was that maybe that’s the problem. Maybe  she should have asked for more from her son along the way instead of just always giving.  Perhaps she has perpetuated a relationship of one-sided giving that will be hard to change. I certainly hope not. 
As usual in most of my blogs this conversation has stayed with me and recently started my brain thinking in-depth more about being a mother and grandmother, whether it is a different relationship with daughters than it is with sons, what it means today and what it means to me. Mother’s Day has just passed and it kind of fits in right now. 
I am fortunate to have two daughters and a son, so I have experiences with mother/daughter and with the mother/son relationships.  I can’t speak for other parent/ child relationships, I only know mine.  In my experience each has been different and evolved into opposites in adulthood. 
I’m trying to think that when I was raising my children if I actually demanded as much from my son as I did my daughters. I know they all had to do chores on Saturday. The girls would vacuum, clean their rooms and help with the house chores, but honestly, I don’t ever remember asking my son to do anything around the house. except try to pick up his clothes up off the floor.  (As a matter-of-fact I was reminded recently by one of my daughters about the picture we took of my son sitting on top of a pile of clothes – a mountain – in his room.) 
 So in my friend’s case, I am finally realizing, I, too, am guilty of treating my son differently. Boys go off and leave their mothers, girls stay.
An old proverb states, “A son is a son until he takes a wife. A daughter is a daughter for all of her life.” Knowing this, is that why we sometimes don’t demand for fear of breaking that bond too soon? 
 I always made my daughters accountable and never minced words with advice when I thought necessary. I never questioned it would weaken our bond or make them love me less. But for some reason I never did the same with my son. Is that normal? 
Our best mother’s dream for our sons is to be able to have him find his soulmate that will love him and share his life’s ups and downs long after we are gone, so why did I tiptoe so much until that moment? 
“Mothers who are ‘important’ convey two main messages to their sons: If I am important then you are important; and I am important so I am worthy of your kindness, which I will affirm,” she said.

“This second message, which is often dramatically overlooked in the child development literature, is perhaps the most important ingredient to helping children develop into wonderful adults,” said Dr. Stone Fish.

Mothers can serve as good models of how to treat a woman with respect, according to Dr. Coleman, a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco specializing in family and parenting issues.

“However, mothers who can comfortably learn to set limits with their sons and act in a healthy self-interested way produce sons who are better friends and partners to women,” explained Dr. Coleman, who is also on the training faculty of the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group and has served on the clinical faculties of The University of California at San Francisco/Mt. Zion Crisis Clinic and The Wright Institute Graduate School of Psychology.  

I have often said to my children that being a mother is the best job I have ever had in my life and if I had a ‘do over’ In hindsight I could have done better.  I know without a doubt am so privileged that ‘part of the way, you were to walk with me.’**

**To My Children – Sandra Hart

©Sandra Hart 2015. all Rights Reserved

Peace. At Last

I was as bald as an onion when I was born. And when I finally did grow hair it was platinum and straight. That all changed …. well …. I don’t know exactly when, maybe about when I was ten or so. Then all hell broke loose. On top of my head. Massive frizz the color of straw.

Braids became my savior. Any solution to tame that unruly crop that suddenly appeared up there. I remember my grandma and mother making my plats so tight my head would ache. But the mess was hidden and undercover. I used to hate it. Hate it…Hate it!

Why is it we are cursed to covet what we don’t have? I have done everything throughout my life since those braids to get rid of the curls. Not the hair, just those darn curls. For me, it is and always has been ‘straight-hair-envy’.

When my mother was getting poodle perms I was embarrassed by my curly, unruly hair. I thought she was crazy to ruin her nice straight hair to look like our family pet. But she didn’t think twice about keeping mine in braids like a show horse’s tail.

At thirteen ‘The Hair War’ between mother and daughter about cutting my hair finally was won by me, and she chopped off my braids. But that’s when the next battle began. The one between me and my new short and wild hair finally escaping from its braided jail.

I struggled through high school using pony tails to normalize the life sprouting from my scalp, but it wasn’t until the mid 60’s that I found out about a cure to what ails me. Hair straightening! I had discovered my new best friend! Considering every model and movie star had beehives and straight hair, my tangled mess was anything but beautiful in the eyes of the celebrity world back then. So I was relaxing, straightening and rolling. This girl did everything measurable within the law to kill my curls.

At home and away from the public eye I walked around like a space alien in front of my children with empty frozen orange juice cans bobby pinned on my head trying, oh so trying, to look like Farrah Fawcett. This was the best method available to me at the time to murder the kink on my head.

And then something quite strange came trending out in the 80’s. Curly hair ?! It was…. It was….. everywhere! Natural, permed, short, or voluminous. Curly was in vogue. Meg Ryan, Susan Sarandon! Gosh, I hadn’t gone out in public with my curly hair in almost 20 years! What in the world?? Should I dare to just shower, fluff it dry and go out of the house?

Nuts as it sounds, that first time I walked out of our apartment onto the streets of Manhattan with my curly hair, I was a little weirded out about being so nakedly honest as to who I really was. To step out being the real me and to embrace, to accept the whole me which included that mass upon my head was hard and a long ride down in the elevator to the street.

I will forever blame it on my husband. It took the ‘hair love’ of my husband for the first time in my entire life to really, really accept my unruly wild and naturally curly hair. He made me do it. It was my husband, finally, who told me to just ‘go for it.’

So recently, when I posted a new profile picture on my Facebook page my cousin made a nice comment about my hair. That reminded me about a photo album my husband has compiled throughout the years taking literally thousands of pictures of my hair. He has always bizarrely been obsessed with my wild hair. So one thing leading to another, and with writing time on my hands today, forgive me for digressing from more important things and selfishly opening up to you about my hair woes and joys.

As a dear friend of mine who suffers from alopecia often reminds me, more is more, less is less and no fun at all.

She is right. There has been a truce. I have made peace with my hair. At last.

P. S. I still haven’t thrown away my magic wand to straightness-my long and narrow hot iron. I suppose if I were a smoker it would be like vaping or sneaking around the corner for a puff or too. Sadly, still addicted. Sometimes. But still at peace.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2014. All rights reserved.

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The Final Cut

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My son, Emerson Hart, released his second solo album today and on the inside cover is a picture of him in his studio in Nashville. On the wall behind my son is his grandfather’s fiddle and a grouping of family pictures, including a silhouette of me when I was about 13 years old. Seeing that silhouette reminded me of an event relating to my short hair in that period of my life.

Summer of 1946………

“Now don’t waste your time trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, young lady. Your curly locks you got from me, and they’ve suited me just fine!” Grandma used to say as she pulled and tugged at my golden mass of kink, taming the wildness on top of my head into thick braids tied with rubber bands at the ends. Much better her fussing with my hair than my mother, who would make the plats so tight my scalp would hurt for days.*

September, 1952………..

I was twelve and I had never had my hair cut. Ever. Except I did have bangs, but that was the only part of my wild flaxen locks that were ever touched. And to me that really didn’t count. I couldn’t wear my hair loose because it was like a big tumble weed on my head it was so thick. So my mother insisted and saw to it that I had braids for what seemed to me to be—-forever.

I was a cheer leader at Roosevelt School on LaBelle View in an industrial town on the Ohio River and in the sixth grade. To be a cheer leader for all of us girls chosen was really a big deal. But for me it was just the opposite. Almost an embarrassment. I had to suffer the humiliation of those braids when all my girlfriends had short hair. On Saturday nights I would hang out with my girlfriends who would wrap strands of hair into pin curls fastened with bobby pins like the grown up girls did. And I envied them for having mothers that understood.

But no matter how much I begged, my mother stood her ground and refused to budge regarding my golden braids – until her patience with my pleading wore thin when I was twelve. She went upstairs and got her big sewing scissors and with one final cut to each braid severed them from my head. Wack. Wack. Just like that. Then she sent me next door to my Aunt Dorothy who did hair from her house, to try to make something of what was left of my hair. Needless to say, that wasn’t easy.

I really should have been traumatized by the harsh and finality of my mother’s chopping off my braids, But at the time I was so relieved from not having those braids anymore, that I didn’t have any thoughts about what my mother did and how she went about it. It just was what it was and I grew into a teenager inside of myself instantly once those those appendages were removed from my head. Kind of a free-at-last .

But it wasn’t until forty five years later when my mother died and I was going through her things did I remember about those braids.

It is true that we never know what is in someone’s heart, a lesson I learned too late in my relationship with my mother.

I loved her very much, but sadly, I never understood how painful it must have been for her to cut from her daughter what she never had. There, in a long faded blue box that probably once held a necklace were my two golden braids-remarkably intact with the rubber bands still securing the silky curled ends.

* Behind The Magic Mirror, Sandra Hart. copyright 2002

Moonlight In Her Eyes, Sandra Hart
Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.

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Through A Child’s Eyes

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The further we get from our past, the kinder and more forgiving we become of our memories. Haven’t you had someone pass from your life, that has either moved on or really moved on from this earthly life? Looking back on that relationship isn’t it easier to see both sides and be more forgiving now that enough time has passed to retain more of the good memories involved in that relationship than the bad?

I loved my mother. I left home when I was eighteen to attend college , and although I never lived at home again, Mother was the constant force that kept me moving forward in my life, no matter how many miles separated us, or how hard my circumstances became. She was always my best cheerleader. In my heart, she was always someone I wanted to emulate.
A perfect woman.

She pushed me to audition for Romper Room when I had little or none of the required background that the other’s seeking the job had. She had a ‘feeling’ about the man I married, yet when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was there emotionally, a pillar of support when I thought I would not survive mentally or financially through it all. My mother walked through the fire with me. She was my rock. And it was this super strength and will that allowed her to love me unconditionally. No matter what stresses I brought into her life, she never abandoned me. And never a day goes by, that I don’t think if her and wish I could pick up the phone to hear her assuring voice again.

New Jersey…..1987

Studies reveal that as we get older our personality traits become more pronounced. Because I left home at such an early age, the impressions I had of my mother were established through immature eyes. And until I brought her to live with me after my father died in 1987 that is the unrealistic image I had of her.

But it did not take me long to be able to see my mother within an adult’s perspective. I soon came to realize that Mother’s strength actually was a form of control over everything in her environment. As a child, I welcomed the attention, but in my 50’s I needed to breathe on my own. My childlike view that Mother was a saint and could do wrong would slowly erode throughout our remaining years together.

Little things like hiding candy under her chair so she wouldn’t have to share, I attributed to her life as one of ten children where sharing would have left little for her. That never really bothered me, but her strong will finally became quite problematic when she stubbornly refused to give up driving even after mistaking the gas peddle for the brake causing her to break through my double front gates and land in the middle of my side lawn closest to the ocean cliff. She was late for a ride to a wedding, so she walked away leaving the car with its wheels dug into the dirt of what remained of my torn up lawn. A wonderful present for me when I arrived home from New York two days later. Somehow she ‘forgot’ to tell me before I came home.

Mother had a mild stroke later that year and under doctor ‘s orders, she entered a rehabilitation facility for physical therapy after that stroke. This was only temporary, but one would think we had sent her to Siberia. What was I thinking!

Had I been clairvoyant I would have prepared myself for what followed. Just three days into her stay at the facility, I got a call in New York close to midnight from the center saying my mother was missing. My husband an I jumped into the car and sped through Lincoln Tunnel back to New Jersey. I was a wreck, thinking the worst.

Well, we finally found her. There she was, nestled cozily back at my house, looking so innocent. She had talked a friend into taking her out on the guise that she would be returning.

But, in the end, I really should have known better to think she would stay there, because she pulled that stunt once more a few weeks later. She remained totally defiant until we decided to let her do what she was determined to do, forget rehab, and remain master of her own fate.

I was not strong enough to go against her, but I knew we had to somehow make her life safer. Whether she liked it or not. She had to accept that living alone in my big remote house was not good nor the best lifestyle for her. The only thing we could do to keep her somewhat independent was to move her down the hill into our small borough where she would have neighbors to check on her and walking ability to all of the comforts of her day. That was the only concession she allowed me, but I don’t think she ever forgave me, either. And on top of that, made sure she told the world how her daughter had betrayed her.

Mother died two years later of another stroke, but she left me, the way she wanted. Living on her own terms. She asked her nurse for her lipstick. Then, a force greater than her’s came and she slipped off quickly and quietly.

In the end, Mother was in control as much as she could ever be facing the unknown powers greater than herself. And I was left with an overpowering, overwhelming loss. Loss of her, her touch, of her strength.

My having to let go of my childhood vision of who she was, was a hard revelation. Probably the hardest lesson I had to learn. I was faced with the reality that she was indeed only human after all.