Someone was coming for dinner. My sister and I always made biscuits: three parts self rising flour to one part shortening; add milk and kneading. And we would set the table with special dishes. Five children, extremely tight budgets, a move overseas and back – my mom preferred useful presents for her birthday or Christmas; and she had shed a lot of her fragile, ornamental things. But she had a very special bubbled brown glass pitcher. I knew, because of all the times she’d told me, that it had been a wedding present.
In the last minute before company arrived, I was carrying it full of ice water to the table – when it slipped. Glass splintered; water burst over the floor; I burst into tears. It was not just the mess, though the mess was a very big problem: my socks were sopping in a flood of shattered glass, and the guests were almost at the door. But more than the mess – it was my mom’s special pitcher. The only special pitcher she had, and one of the few things she’d talked about as special to her, to which I’d attached any sense of her before I existed, and which seemed to hold dimensions not of water, but of my mom’s self.
Almost as instantly, my mom was there: cleaning up, making sure I didn’t budge onto sharp glass, comforting me. I sobbed apologies; and in whatever childish words I had, I sobbed out my sense of some irreparable loss. “Honey,” my mom said. “It’s just a pitcher. You’re my daughter.”
All the hard things on earth that should not be – all the poverty, cruelty, loss, confused values, or everyday selfishness of human beings – fall hardest on little ones. Our world talks big about caring for children, and then all the grown ups go on pursuing the real things they value: addictions, success, control, wealth, hobbies, prestige …
Jesus didn’t care much about our evaluations of success, or prestige – even about the evaluations of religious people. He said that whoever welcomes a child welcomes His Father.
My mom’s reflex action when I had ruined the dining room just in time for company and broken one of her special things – when she did not pause over the extra trouble or the embarrassment or loss, in assessing the real damage of the moment – that reflex action continues to show me the character of Jesus.
Recently my mom asked if I wanted her to set aside any of the beautiful things she still has from her past, or inherited from my grandmothers. I thought hard.
We’ve moved upwards of twenty times over my married life; and I don’t think I have a single dish from our first studio apartment, in which a panel bed wobbled down from the wall and took up the whole length and breadth of squared space. At some point I had a few dishes from my grandmother; but one of them slipped to the unsparing floor. And somewhere around a move we made in four suitcases to another country, I had to give the rest away. I have only one dish that used to belong to my mom: a little wooden bowl with paddles that just fits into little hands.
I have kept that, because it fits into suitcases and gets played with by children. It has been a tureen for a soup of beads, and a small lake for extremely small pandas, and a petrified turtle shell. It has naturally been a hat, and a spaceship. I doubt its manifestations will be very distinctly remembered; but someone who played with it was asked by her parents where she would go when died, and she said she was coming to our place. Unless her parents remind her, I doubt she will remember even that; and the ten year old who recently spent a few nights here won’t remember sipping tea with me over a volume of Peanuts at fivish AM. Our early mornings will fade into the background of her more significantly experienced life. But whether we consciously retain them or not – we are filled up, unappraisably precious vessels that we are – with such moments. We open to the impressions we receive, and we tend to pour them into other lives.
I opened to impressions of a woman who felt honored to welcome a child, and treated many other things as relatively meaningless.
I did wind up telling my mom about a few pieces I would like to have that hold dimensions of her past, but I don’t think I grip tangible objects much better now than when I broke her bubbled glass pitcher. Dishes are just as likely as ever to slip from my hands, or to ricochet off something else I dropped.
But the love my mom gave me when I broke her wedding gift is an heirloom I am still carrying. It’s something I have taken everywhere, and use every day.
The Joseph Tree, a collection of poems, is available from Wiseblood. For a preview of West of Moonlight, East of Dawn, her retelling of an old fairy tale, visit westofmoonlight.art.
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My heart is full reading this story. Thank you for this reading fellowship today.
This is beautifully written, and holds a heart-deep reminder about what really matters. Thank you. Yesterday I shouted at my daughter for breaking glass, and wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t even anything special. I pray to grow into a quieter voice and more grace so that my children will know how much they really do matter to me.
Your children are so blessed to have such a tender hearted mom, who prays. I could hear how much you love them reading your comment. Thank you for how you put that prayer — to be a quieter voice in the pressures that wring louder words out of us. I pray along those lines for myself too, but haven’t had such a helpful phrasing for my own prayers — I will hang onto that. I remind myself often that God sees the whole picture of all the grace He’s given for every day, too; and we rarely see that about ourselves clearly. I hear so much grace in your thoughtful and loving comment.
Such a sweet story. Loved reading it. Thank you for sharing!
It is so true, things are just things. But people are created in the Image of God. Thank you for reminding us what is truly important.