Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul (29 page)
Read Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
That night, I wrote down in the form of a story all the questions that puzzled me about life. I realized that many of them were hard to answer, and perhaps others could not be answered at all. When I turned in my paper, I was afraid that I might fail the assignment because I had not answered the question, “I wonder why things are the way they are?” I had no answers. I had only written questions.
The next day Mr. Reynolds called me to the front of the class and asked me to read my story for the other students. He handed me the paper and sat down in the back of the room. The class became quiet as I began to read my story:
Mommie,Daddy ...Why?
Mommie, why are the roses red? Mommie, why is the grass green and the sky blue? Why does a spider have a web and not a house?
Daddy, why can’t I play in your toolbox?
Teacher, why do I have to read?
Mother, why can’t I wear lipstick to the dance? Daddy, why can’t I stay out until 12:00?
The other kids are. Mother, why do you hate me? Daddy, why don’t the boys like me? Why do I have to beso skinny? Why do I have to have braces and wear glasses? Why do I have to be 16?
Mom, why do I have to graduate? Dad, why do I have to grow up?Mom,Dad,why do I have to leave?
Mom, why don’t you write more often? Dad, why do I miss my old friends? Dad, why do you love me so much? Dad, why do you spoil me?
Your little girl is growing up. Mom, why don’t you visit? Mom, why is it hard to make new friends? Dad, why do I miss being at home?
Dad, why does my heart skip a beat when he looks in my eyes? Mom, why do my legs tremble when I hear his voice? Mother, why is being “in love”the greatest feeling in the world?
Daddy, why don’t you like to be called “Gramps”? Mother, why do my baby’s tiny fingers cling so tightly to mine?
Mother, why do they have to grow up?
Daddy, why do they have to leave? Why do I have to be called “Grannie”?
Mommie, Daddy, why did you have to leave me? I need you.
Why did my youth slip past me? Why does my face show every smile that I have ever given to a friend or a stranger? Why does my hair glisten a shiny silver? Why do my hands quiver when I bend to pick a flower?Why,God,are the roses red?
At the conclusion of my story, my eyes locked with Mr. Reynolds’s eyes, and I saw a tear slowly sliding down his cheek. It was then that I realized that life is not always based on the answers we receive, but also on the questions that we ask.
Christy Carter Koski
I
am the woman who holds up the sky.
The rainbow runs through my eyes.
The sun makes a path to my womb.
My thoughts are in the shapes of clouds.
But my words are yet to come.
Ute poem
THE FAMILY
CIRCUS
“Was there an older generation when you were little, Mommy?”
Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.
W
hen a child is born, so are grandmothers.
Judith Levy
There is something to be said about leaving a piece of yourself behind in the form of children. Twenty-seven years ago I looked upon my daughter for the first time as she was laid upon my belly, her umbilical cord still attached to me. Her little eyes seemed endless as she looked at me. I witnessed a piece of myself lying there, and yet she was so curiously and wondrously unique.
Today I stand next to her, wiping her face and reminding her to focus on the birthing movements of her own body instead of on pain and fear. She has always been utterly terrified of pain. Yet here she is... refusing all drugs... living her determination to birth her baby as nature would have it, as did the endless stream of her great-grandmothers before her.
Centuries of pushing, preparing, sighing—and then my daughter’s daughter is placed across her mother’s breast, staring into her mother’s eyes. The Great Mystery is blessing me again, letting me see my granddaughter, the piece of myself who will step into the future and in turn mold her own child, my great-grandchild.
Kay Cordell Whitaker
When my grandfather died, my 83-year-old grandmother, once so full of life, slowly began to fade. No longer able to manage a home of her own, she moved in with my mother, where she was visited often by other members of her large, loving family (two children, eight grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and two great–great-grandchildren). Although she still had her good days, it was often hard to arouse her interest.
But one chilly December afternoon three years ago, my daughter Meagan, then eight, and I were settling in for a long visit with “GG,” as the family calls her, when she noticed that Meagan was carrying her favorite doll.
“I, too, had a special doll when I was a little girl,” she told a wide-eyed Meagan. “I got it one Christmas when I was about your age. I lived in an old farmhouse in Maine, with Mom, Dad and my four sisters, and the very first gift I opened that Christmas was the most beautiful doll you’d ever want to see.
“She had an exquisite, hand-painted porcelain face, and her long brown hair was pulled back with a big pink bow. Her eyes were blue as blue could be, and they opened and closed. I remember she had a body of kidskin, and her arms and legs bent at the joints.”
GG’s voice dropped low, taking on an almost reverent tone. “My doll was dressed in a dainty pink gown, trimmed with fine lace. But what I especially remember was her petticoat. It was fine batiste, trimmed with rows and rows of delicate lace. And the tiny buttons on her boots were real.... Getting such a fine doll was like a miracle for a little farm girl like me—my parents must have had to sacrifice so much to afford it. But how happy I was that morning!”
GG’s eyes filled and her voice shook with emotion as she recalled that Christmas of long ago. “I played with my doll all morning long. She was such a beautiful doll.... And then it happened. My mother called us to the dining room for Christmas dinner and I laid my new doll down, ever so gently, on the hall table. But as I went to join the family at the table, I heard a loud crash.
“I hardly had to turn around—I knew it was my precious doll. I just knew it. And it was. Her lace petticoat had hung down from the table just enough for my baby sister to reach up and pull on it. When I ran in from the dining room, there lay my beautiful doll on the floor, her face smashed into a dozen pieces. I can still see my mother trying to put my poor dolly together again. But it couldn’t be done. She was gone forever.”
A few years later, GG’s baby sister was also gone, she told Meagan, a victim of pneumonia. Now the tears in her eyes spilled over—tears, I knew, not only for a lost doll and a lost sister, but for a lost time.
Subdued for the rest of the visit, Meagan was no sooner in the car going home than she exclaimed, “Mom, I have a great idea! Let’s get GG a new doll for Christmas, one exactly like the doll that got broken. Then she won’t cry when she thinks about it.”
My heart filled with pride as I listened to my compassionate little daughter. But where would we find a doll to match GG’s fond memories?
Where there’s a will, as they say, there’s a way. When I told my best friends, Liz and Chris, about my problem, Liz put me in touch with a local doll maker who made doll heads, hands and feet of a ceramic that closely resembled the old porcelain ones. From her I commissioned a doll head in the style of three-quarters of a century ago—making sure to specify “big blue eyes that opened and closed,” and hands and feet. From a doll supply house I ordered a long brown wig and a kidskin body, and Meagan and I shopped for fabric, lace and ribbon to duplicate the outfit GG had so lovingly described. Liz, who had some experience with a hot-glue gun, volunteered to put the doll together, and as the last days before Christmas raced by, Chris helped me make the doll’s outfit, complete with lacy petticoat. And while Liz, Chris and I searched for doll “boots with real buttons,” Meagan wrote and illustrated the story of the lost doll.
Finally, our creation was finished. To our eyes it was perfect. But, of course, there was no way it could be
exactly
like the doll GG had loved so much and lost. Would she think it looked anything like it?
On Christmas Eve, Meagan and I carried our gaily wrapped gift to GG, where she sat surrounded by children, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins. “It’s for you,” Meagan said, “but first you have to read the story that goes with it.”
“Read it out loud,” one of the other children demanded. GG no sooner got through the first page than her voice cracked and she was unable to go on, but Meagan took over where she left off. Then it was time to open her present.
I’ll never forget the look on GG’s face as she lifted the doll and held it to her chest. Once again her tears fell, but this time they were tears of joy. Cradling the doll in her frail arms, she repeated over and over again, “She’s exactly like my old doll, exactly like her.”
And perhaps she
wasn’t
saying that just to be kind. Perhaps however impossible it seemed, we
had
managed to produce a close facsimile of the doll she remembered. But as I watched my eight-year-old daughter and her great-grandmother examining the doll together, I thought of a likelier explanation. What GG really recognized, perhaps, was the love that inspired the gift. And love, wherever it comes from, always looks the same.
Jacqueline Hickey
“If we let Mom stay alone in the house any longer, it will be neglect.”
My brother’s words to me on the phone set in motion an immediate sequence of events that include helping our mother move from the little house where she has lived for nearly 60 years into a retirement home apartment a hundred miles away. We will have a week to get the house packed up. In my mind’s eye I see her standing helplessly in her yellow kitchen, shoulders drooped, sensing something “bad” is about to happen, but not always remembering what. I cannot bear the thought of her last seven long days in that house—alone and facing a heart-wrenching move from her precious roots.
I teach my classes the next day and catch a red-eye special home to help her.
The seven days that follow are bittersweet ones: some of the richest days of my life, but some of the most challenging and poignant. Mom’s state of mind is immediately apparent. Over the phone she had told me she’d begun to pack, but when I arrive, only two cardboard boxes stand open in the back bedroom. At the bottom of one box lie two little lace doilies she crocheted before she and Dad got married. The other contains three rolls of toilet paper— nothing more. This is the extent of her “packing”; the rest is too overwhelming. “I just don’t know where to start, Rita.” Already my heart is weeping with her.
We do not start with packing. In fact, the whole week I am there, we do not take down a single picture or upset the orderliness of the house in any way. (My sisters’ orders: “You be the advance team, Rita. Just be with her in the grieving and in the good-byes. When
we
get there, we’ll pack. Okay?”)
I try to think of what might lift Mom’s spirits: maybe we can walk a bit by the lake—that’s sure to do it. Some of my earliest and sharpest memories of my mother are of her walking, everywhere, for the family owned no car.
What a confident, joyful walker she was! One remarkably vivid picture is engraved on my nine-year-old mind: It is a hot August day. Mom is striding briskly along the lake across from our house—toward the hospital on the other side—on her way to give birth to my sister Mary. On her way to give birth? Striding? Briskly? Yes. Dad could scarcely keep up with her.
In a way, walking has always been a prime measure of Mom’s state of well-being. Walking helps feed and create a positive sense of herself, gives her a feeling of aliveness, of vitality.
In later years, when all her kids are launched, walking around that little lake across from our house becomes a daily treat for Mom—once she has a car and doesn’t have to walk everywhere else. It is also a favorite ritual of ours when I come to visit. In the past three or four years, however, with her feet swollen and painful, Mom has not been up to it, much to her great dismay. Nevertheless, before I start out, I always ask anyway, “Are you able to go walking today, Mom?”
