NOT MAKING MY MOTHER’S MISTAKES
For my 35th birthday last June, I decided I wanted to paint some ceramics. So I dragged my parents and husband to Color Me Mine in the middle of the week. The location we went to was on the brink of shutting down and we were the only customers. As we debated what to paint, my mother declared she wasn’t going to partake in what is (strangely) my favorite activity. She said she wasn’t any good at it, so it was better not to try. Using my birthday girl privileges, I pressured her to do it anyway and within the hour she had created a beautifully design on a ceramic plate that now sits proudly on my coffee table. Yet, when we all told her it was stunning, she refused to believe it.
Since my brilliant mother died in September, I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about all the ways I want to continue her legacy of curiosity and kindness. We’ve always been eerily similar from our face to our killer dance moves. I found our similarities delightful while she was alive and even more precious now that she’s gone. But my mother was not one to wear rose-colored glasses. She was a practical realist with a master’s in journalism. She would be the first to admit that to not include her flaws in my memory of her would be refusing to tell the whole story. Not to mention, there is as much to learn from what held her back—like her fear of not being good enough to even try—as there is to learn from what made her exceptional.