Voices of Our Mothers and Grandmothers...

Voices of our mothers…

The phone rang this morning while I was eating breakfast.  Angelica, the Mexican woman I tutor, was calling. This usually means she has to cancel class. 

            “Como estas, Angelica?” I greeted her. She told me that they had had a flood in her basement last night where we usually have our English class.  Timidly she suggested perhaps I’d better not come today since “el plomero” was on his way to see what the cause was.

            “No hay problema,” I heard myself say reassuringly.  Of course, we could cancel and meet another day.  When I hung up the “no hay problema” kept replaying itself in my head. “It is Mother’s voice,” I thought.

“No hay problema” is the reassuring Spanish reply to something distressful.  It was Mother’s mantra especially the last years of her life.  Despite her lack of proficiency in Spanish, as the peacemaker in our family, Mother adopted “no hay problema” and used it over and over in the years after she no longer lived in Latin America.  I can hear her soothing Dad, who was easily upset by small mishaps, with “no hay problema”. She meant, “it’s going to be alright.”  Or in the last months of her life when someone was off schedule at Heather Glen where she lived, she’d tell me about it and then quickly add  “no hay problema”.  It was her way of looking on the bright side of things.

            Having relied on Art all my adult life as the “everything is going to be alright” partner, I find myself wanting to be more of a “no hay problema” person.  Perhaps it’s because I miss my mother all the time. There was so much about her that I loved and admired but towards the end, it was her strength to keep going when faced with difficult health issues that left me awestruck.  She lived her mantra of ”no hay problema” reassuring herself, and everyone who loved her that all was well right up till the very end.

My Mother and Jenny's Mum

            Voices of our mothers…

Jenny, my English sister who lives in London wrote an email yesterday about helping eleven-year-old granddaughter, Emily, with a sewing project for school. Emily needed to make something related to World War II.  She wanted to sew a dress.  Jenny does not sew and suggested a skirt.  She hoped that would be easier. Knowing I love to sew she related what a long and stressful day it was for her.  Emily did make her first skirt. She told her grandmother that she would call the project “make do and mend” which was a slogan during the war when clothes and material were on ration and precious.

Although Mum has been gone for 26 years now I still miss her and so wished she was with me yesterday.  She would have loved to see Emily “dressmaking”…and oh, how I wished I’d listened to her when I was younger… (when she wanted to teach Jenny to sew). 

Voices of our grandmothers…

“Our grandson, just had his first birthday party in February,” I was telling an acquaintance at church last week.  “But we didn’t get to go because of all the wintry weather in Washington, Even the party had to be postponed for a day.”

“We’ll go in April, instead,” I added to reassure myself that we will see him soon.  As a grandmother I want to be an important part of his life.

 The conversation could have ended there but suddenly I found myself launching into the story of my grandmother and my 8^th birthday party. …to someone I didn’t really know all that well.

“I grew up in Latin America, and lived far away from my grandmother,”  I found myself revealing to this person.   ‘We did go back to Iowa for visits every few years and the summer I was 8 years old we were on “home leave” from Argentina .  My grandmother was so thrilled to see me.  I remember her telling me that what she missed the most was never being able to be with me on my birthday which was in September.”

Perhaps it was a spur of the moment thought she had but she told me I could have a birthday party that week even though it was June.  That way she’d just pretend it was my real birthday.  Being a self-confident 8-year-old, I took her at her word and went all over the neighborhood inviting any child I could find to my birthday party at 1242 43^rd Street – my grandmother’s house.  Years later my mother told me that Grandmother was taken aback when so many children showed up in her back yard for the party.  I was delighted but it probably was more than she had bargained for.”

            As I walked out of church I wondered why I had revealed all of that to someone I didn’t know very well. The voice of Grandmother and the memory was so strong, I had to tell it to someone right then.

            Voices of our grandmothers…

            A few weeks ago an email arrived from my cousin Blythe whom I haven’t seen in several decades.  She loved my mother and has suddenly been writing to me often about how much she thinks of Aunt Virginia and misses her.  But this last email brought tears when I she wrote

            I am doing some watercolor painting now, took a class a few months back and all my personal painting sessions with Grandma Blythe came flooding into my head (our grandmother was a talented artist and painted all her life)…was wonderful…encouraging!  Now it is our turn to be Grandmas and make memories…for our grandchildren.

            Voices of loved ones

            When I was a child and someone died, my mother always told us that in death you live in on the minds and the hearts of the people that loved you.  I suppose we accepted that explanation as something adults tell you without understanding what it meant

Now I am a grandmother andI am listening to those familiar voices of the past that live in my head and deep in my heart... Someday perhaps I will be cherished in just this way by surviving loved ones.

Mother - 1919-2014