Mother’s Day – OccasionalPiece

All the fruits are finished, and applied to the background this week.

I tried three different centers, from white daisies on red (no), a double plaid (no), a beautiful radish print (no).

Dots. That’s what worked, was dots.

This was my first tentative step forward. As I peeled the fruits from their parchment paper backgrounds, I would occasionally find a place where the light crept through, so I reached for my bag of scraps and cut another tiny angular piece to cover up the holes. I have now learned that obsessing over these scraps is a fool’s errand.

I’ve got a good start, but the needle keeps gumming up. I looked for anti-stick needles, but they don’t make them for the big quilting machines (I have a Handiquilter Sweet Sixteen) so I’m resigned to changing out the needle often and in between, swipes with nail polish remover. We run a high-tech shop, here.

When my mother was 90 years old, just the seven children hosted a luncheon for her, celebrating her life, which led me to think about mothers.

Mothers come in tall, medium and large. Mothers come in grumpy and happy. Mothers come in tired. Mothers come in a combination of adoring their children, frustrated with their children, and when will this kid ever go to college. Mothers love flowers, stroking babies’ cheeks, catching them when they dash through the mall as toddlers, pining for them when they go off to college, usually never to return home. Mothers come in all colors. Mothers come in street-smart, book-smart, and not-so-smart, but they all come in surprised at the task that lies before them and hope they will make it. Mothers mostly do, and if and when they don’t, other mothers somehow find their way to us, to teach us, bring us up, and leave us with memories.

Happy Mother’s Day–

Well, Happy Mother’s Day a bit early, actually, as tomorrow we are headed to Los Angeles to celebrate my sister’s newest grandchild. We’ll probably wear masks. Our luncheon is outside. Life goes on. Mother’s Day is a day to honor our mothers, and I’m lucky to have a great one. She turns 92 years old at the end of this month, and I am fully in Abraham Lincoln’s camp: “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”

I’ve had a great mother-in-law, and a mother-in-law that wasn’t so great — or at least that’s how I viewed things in my earlier life. Now that I’m a mother-in-law, I understand the not-so-great woman much better and hope she will forgive me for my failings. I’ve had great women who taught me how to quilt, mothering me into a craft that has sustained me for years. I owe them a great debt.

Where does the beginning start? We think this weekend of mothers and how they give birth to us and raise us. If we are fortunate we have a good mother. If life throws you a brutal curveball, you had a terrible mother. Reams of paper have been used in writing about those two polar opposites; I will not add my words to that pile today.

But somewhere we all had a beginning. Some beginnings are early, and we can locate the source and revere what gave us our start. Other beginnings come later, often after tragedy, pain, death, or divorce, and the reins of life are picked up again in a new beginning. I think it appropriate that whoever you decide is your mother — whether it be a birth mother, or an adoptive mother, someone who took you in, or someone who freed you to grow and fly — I hope that this day you are able to honor and remember them.

I also honor the mothers of all these grandchildren in our laps, a photo taken years ago, those young children giving us such delight (three are missing!). My daughter and daughters-in-law are all devoted to their families. I also love and respect my sisters, my in-laws, aunts, grandmothers. While there are always a few ringers, women who are best at a distance, I am fortunate to have such a great circle of love from women in my life, examples to follow and people from who I can pick up advice about teenagers, babies, husbands and daily living. And quilting.

I wish the same for you.
Happy Mother’s Day!