I started to think about my mother after finishing the book “ The Time Traveler’s Wife”. In it, there were two templates of mothers (other than the maternal episodes experienced by the eponymous main character of the novel.). Both were very artistically gifted: the former, an opera singer was exuberant, generous and tragically short-lived. The latter, a secretive but virtuoso poet was the wife of an indulgent businessman. Petulantly mercurial, I think she reminded me distantly of my mother.
The take home point from that train of thought is that my mother’s story doesn’t start with my own story. It stretches far before and beyond my own. As I daily forgive her for our baggage (you know the imagined or real transgressions that mothers and daughters have between them, not the least of which are expectations), I have to remember that she is her own person first, and (no matter what she tells me) my mother second.
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