Like Your Mother

Walking into my mother’s house is like a fairytale.  You feel like you’ve accidentally happened on a door that transports you to another world with bright colors everywhere and sweet smells.  The walls are filled with art and the shelves crammed with books, the tables topped with fresh flowers from her garden and a fire burning beside. 

Her house is a pair of red slippers, a wardrobe, a rabbit hole, and “straight on ‘til morning.”

You are no longer in a drab suburb but have entered a mystical land where the food tastes better, your hair looks great, and the beds are blissful mounds of cotton and silk ready with open arms to cradle you in sleep and lead you into dreams.

It is strange that such a person as my mother has been able to stay in one place so long.  Years ago, having lost her father to a heart attack and her mother to heartbreak, she came to this town with just a suitcase and alarm clock in search of the home that was stolen from her by tragedy. The free spirit and troubled heart of her youth chased her even into my own. 

Everything that my mother has done since then has been an attempt to create what she desired most and what she believed, beyond all trouble, existed – a home and a refuge from restlessness. 

A new and exotic kitchen color would appear on the walls, which she would inevitably want to change the very next day.  Not quite right.  Not right at all.  “I want to throw up just looking at it!” She would say. 

Home Depot’s color selection never fully met her vision.

When Mom was not teaching, running her own business, or writing, she was creating.  I never had store bought blankets.  I never felt a synthetic comforter around my body in fact the term seems to me an oxymoron.  No, my mom made quilts that she neatly folded and stacked high near every couch.  “You see this Valerie?” she said while spreading one out on my bed.  “This one is called trip around the world.” She would look down at it wistfully and then look at me with the same expression.

And she would travel, willingly throwing herself into any culture and finding the most charming corner only to return home again, carrying some piece of that world with her.  Every trip around the world would expand her paradise one more inch, one more keepsake.

Part of my understanding of this woman still lies in vivid memories of her standing in front of a window as if it were a magic mirror, her hair lit with the light of dusk and her expression one of deep and unreachable longing. 

I have always dreamed of the thoughts that she must have had in those quiet moments and over time I have determined that she must have been speaking with God.  She must have been asking him what heaven was like.  And I believe that her home is a painting, her scaled model of the things he told her.  I believe that he gave her dreams so that she would not have to search any longer.

Now her vision reaches far beyond the walls of her house.  She has dreamt greater things for me, her daughter, than I ever could have allowed myself to dream and has again and again invited me through the doorway and into her world.

People constantly tell me that I look like my mother.  This is compliment enough but I wish they would tell me, “You dream like your mother.”