kale, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry salad with cilantro and cider vinaigrette, quinoa with sweet potato in the background |
Freyja and I on her birthday |
I went to pick her up today from my mother's house and I found my mother and Freyja seated in the middle of the livingroom with glitter coating most surfaces, and bits and bobs of stuff everywhere.
My stepfather silently running the fancy vacuum cleaner over the expensive carpets, not a drop of annoyance to be found. He is pleased when my mother is pleased and she is pleased when things are busy and chaotic. when there is LIFE being LIVED in the house, amid the knick knacks and shiny things.
The house felt a little like you imagine Santa's workshop to feel. My mother gleefully gluing felt on a Valentine box, that I would have not had the patience not, to correct or improve.
Isn't it a beauty! Freyja did it all herself, I am just finishing up the bottom!
My mother is not artistic or so she would say, so she has said my whole life, although she makes remarkable embroidery and has made both of my children amazing wall hangings featuring "the little prince" and "my father's dragon", that made from fabric, pieced together perfectly.
When I was a child we were poorest of poor, but I was provided with all the art supplies any child could wish for, when I was ten my grandparents and my mother bought me a real sewing machine, because I sat around hand sewing Barbie clothes and other projects compulsively, as if driven by some mad sweat shop owner.
I crocheted poorly but with gusto, which many years latter I would parlay into a mediocre knitting habit, before it was hip to knit in SE Portland, dressing my baby boy in ugly sweaters until he finally begged me to stop at age five.
When I was seven I wanted to cook, and was allowed to dabble in the kitchen in a manner that I would never permit, either of my children or even my husband to do, to this day. I am frequently my mother's harshest critic, but when I think of the width and breath of experiment allow me, I know that the result is who I am today. It is highly unlikely that I will ever lighten up and allow my children the space and room for experimentation, art and craft that I had as a child, but I do recognize it and admire it from a distance.
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