As homeschooled students, my girls wouldn’t normally have a homecoming dance to attend, but every year their public-schooled friends from church thoughtfully invite them. They always go as a group and that  makes me feel a little better about the situation. This was Clara’s first homecoming dance. She was very excited about picking out a dress and spending the day at her friend’s house getting ready. They had dinner at her friend’s house, so I went over and took pictures. This photo of her on the way to the dance in the back seat of our car was one of my favorites. Oh, how they grow…

My mother and I had a complicated relationship. I wish I could tell you what a wonderful mother she was because, in turns, she was. But then, it would feel like a half-lie. And a half-lie is almost always or usually very nearly a full lie. If I tell you of the other topsy-turvy, spinning turns of my life with my mother, I would feel like I was betraying the good in her. She was a woman living her life as best she could on this planet. How can I criticize that?

If I tell you how much I want my mommy right now, you would assume I meant my mother. I assumed I meant her. Now I am not so sure. 

I feel so lost. I want someone to hold me, rock me back and forth and softly, through my great heaving sobs, tell me that everything is going to be okay. Someone who won’t care that I am getting her shirt all wet with my tears. And I want to stay there as long as I need to stay there. Not until she tires of it all and plops me back down on the hard wooden rocker all alone. I want to be able to cry myself to sleep and wake up still in my mother’s arms. But not really my mother.

My husband wants me to get on with my life. To buck up. To be the adult. I don’t want to be the adult right now. I want to have a great, screaming meltdown in the middle of the supermarket floor just as the cart is already half full of groceries and everyone is staring and muttering that someone really should do something about this child.

My children want me to help them with their math problems. To fix their dinner. To clean the tub. I want someone to do those things, too. Someone to make sure I have fresh sheets on my bed and a clean dress laid out for tomorrow. Someone who knows where my shoes are.

Where is she? Where is this person called Mother. Who is this person called Mother? Why is everyone looking at me?

What is it?

It’s Clara’s own springtime perfume concoction.

God’s Will

I know, I know where violets blow
Upon a sweet hillside,
And very bashfully they grow
And in the grasses hide—
It is the fairest field, I trow,
In the whole world wide.

One spring I saw two lassies go,
Brown cheek and laughing eye;
They swung their aprons to and fro,
They filled them very high
With violets—then whispered low
So strange, I wondered why.

I know where violet tendrils creep
And crumbled tombstones lie,
The green churchyard is silence-deep;
The village folk go by,
And lassies laugh and women weep,
And God knows why.

Robert Louis Munger