Missing Mom

I have been immersed in the domestic tasks commonly assigned to women, today, tasks I have managed to avoid developing an expertise in most of my life. When I was growing up, I hung out with the uncles playing poker and drinking in the basement, rather than watch the aunts in the kitchen upstairs, toiling over the turkey and stuffing. I climbed trees and tromped through the woods with my fishing pole, rather than learn the art of mending dresses and spiffing up my patent leather shoes. I wore a football helmet for an entire year, while other girls my age were learning how to twirl their hair into spit curls. My junior high outfits consisted of love beads, tie-dye shirts, and overalls, leaving little room for slinky shirts and panty hose. I never really paid attention to feminine things. They just didn't seem to interest me much.

But now, at the age of 52, the universe is drawing me into tasks and desires that usually belong to the traditional roles of my gender. Here in England, clothes are hung on the line rather than thrown into a dryer, which necessitates figuring out how to operate an iron, unless I want to look like I retrieved my outfits from the rag-bag. The lack of convienent foods, pre-made sauces, and frozen food sections in the grocery requires me to learn to cook. And the gradual aging of my facial features has caused me to try a bit of eye makeup and blush, at least when I am headed into work. These are things most women learned as little girls, at their mothers' sides. But I did not see the need for them then; and now that I do, my mother cannot teach them to me.

My mother was not the most traditionally feminine person, either, but there were a few things she knew well:

She knew how to iron a shirt without pressing more wrinkles into the fabric than she was trying to get rid of.

She knew how to paint her toenails red without also blotching up her toes.

She knew how to apply make up without making herself look like Bette Davis in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane."

She wasn't a fabulous cook, but she could make the best potato salad anyone ever tasted, and she understood the use of oils, baking dishes, casseroles, and roasting pans. One of the last things she did for me, while laying in her hospital bed, hooked up to a feeding tube, was talk me through the browning of a piece of meat to make a roast.

She could cut vegetables for salad into nice, even pieces, instead of odd, mangled, chunks.

She was an expert seamstress. She'd find a matching button for any blouse or pants, and sew it on by hand while you waited. She could resize clothes to match our losing or gaining patterns. She sewed my home ec project to keep me from flunking the class.

She could get out any kind of stain--blood, chocolate, grass, it didn't matter--she worked at it until it was gone.

Sometimes, it is not the big things we miss, when we lose our mothers, but the little things we took for granted, that come to mean so much.