My mom was really good at being a Mommy. She fixed our toys and our hurts. Rocked us when we were sad. She made us feel needed and involved in the running of the household. I remember standing on a chair by the kitchen counter when I was about two along with my three older sisters. We were "helping" my mom make cookies. Each of us got a job to do, then we all helped roll the cookies into balls. When they were done - probably about two hours later than if she had just done it herself- they tasted yummy.
My mom sang us songs - "Oh my darlin', Clementine", "Oh Susanna", "Lazy Mary will you get up..."- and many more. She also read us stories. Many, many stories. When I was around five years old, she read us Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. I remember being so interested and excited about them. I could hardly wait from one evening to the next to see what would happen next. One Saturday afternoon when I was taking a bath, we lived in the house in Vancouver, WA then, I decided that when I grew up I wanted to write stories too. At this point in my life I had not yet learned to read or write, nevertheless, the desire to be a writer persisted far beyond my learning of those skills.
These memories came to my mind last weekend. It had been a hard week. It was the first week back in the classroom, so there was some major shifting of my mental gears and physical habits going on. In addition, we had only a few hours earlier received news that a young man in our church - only 20 years old - had died suddenly of a heart attack. Because of these things, I may have been predisposed to be feeling a little bit down, but it took me by surprise anyway to find that after remembering about being a little girl who wanted to be a writer I was sitting there with tears running down my face. The surprise comes into play because crying is not one of the ways I usually display my emotions. I think that in the last five years, my dad's funeral and one other time were the only times I cried.
As I sat there trying to figure out why I was crying, I told myself lies. I thought things such as, "What is the point in even trying to write, I have nothing worthwhile to offer anybody." "My writing is not very good.", and "My life is just not that interesting, nobody wants to hear about it." Even now, as I reflect on it, I am having trouble seeing what it is that I have to offer to anybody, but, whether when writing, or just in living I know that because God made me in his own image, I have some hope that somewhere in my seemingly mediocre make-up, there is something worthwhile.
