Mom

You think you know all there is to know about your mother, don’t you?

What if, say, for example, you needed a baby photo of yourself and while rummaging through a ragged family album, you stumbled across a packet of old papers. And let’s say you recognized the handwriting as your mother’s distinctive backward slanting cursive but the words were not so familiar. Suppose the language and content were more fluid and erudite that anything you could remember coming from your country-raised, housewife mom.

What if, as you read through a letter to a newspaper editor written more than thirty years ago, you could hear your mother’s voice speaking out eloquently against the Vietnam War and what if her arguments were radical for 1966, but searingly valid for today. How would you feel? Proud? Or maybe uncomfortable - as though, chances are, you may have missed out on something, like a 14K opportunity.

What if, as you skimmed through those yellowed pages, you had begun to visualize a self-educated, sensitive woman who had painstakingly garnered and reproduced dozens of quotations from icons such as, Confucius, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Kahlil Gibran, and the vision that was emerging was not the warm fuzzy one of the mother who sang off key, at the top of her lungs, while she went about the mundane job of homemaking. At that point, perhaps your confidence in your collected knowledge might have shuttered and begun to crack. Perhaps a chilling realization might have crept slowly into your center...if your mother was more than you thought she was, then, what else don’t you know? Do you even know everything you could know about yourself?

And finally, what if, when you had finished, you were left awestruck on the floor, surrounded with a rich legacy of which you had been completely oblivious to all these years? What if it was too late to ask all those questions that were now throbbing in your head? Would you feel frustrated? How about foolish?

All I’m saying is, it could happen.