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knoxcotn-digest Sunday, July 2 2000 Volume 01 : Number 105
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2000 11:47:34 -0700 From: "Billie R. McNamara" <knox@tngenweb.org> Subject: [KnoxCoTN] 14 May 2000: Sunday Afternoon Rocking Note: Due to the "special nature" of this weekend, and a busy schedule, Sunday Afternoon Rocking is being sent early. -jan "For the Mothers" (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series) Afternoon All, So much has changed in our world from the time of our ancestors that as closely as many of us study history and pour over documents, it is hard sometimes to actually get a handle on how they may have thought, on how their worlds molded them into far different responses than we might have today. Indeed, if we could but meet our own many greats granny for just a space in time, we might be very surprised how hard it would be to actually find a common ground, as much as we like to imagine such a meeting to be very different. But I think...some things are universal...no matter where in the world one might call home, no matter what niche in time one drew breath. One of those things that I feel can be called the ultimate in "the universality of the human experience" is Motherhood. Today is for the mothers... The day a woman gazes on the face of her newborn infant, or in any way takes on a child to consider her own, her life is forever changed, and I cannot imagine that this would have been different at any point in history. Her life is suddenly never again really her own, and she would have it no other way. I can remember rocking my ailing children hour after hour in the soft light of a lamp unto the first streaks of dawn, and so can many of you. And it is easy not just to imagine, but to KNOW, mother after mother through the march of years has sat by firelight, candlelight, cuddling and rocking a feverish fussing child, anxiously watching, anxiously comforting, anxiously praying. Whether it be fear of enemy peoples, or the starvation, disease, animals of the wild in another era...or fear of financial woes, marital concerns, job security of today...there is no true mother who would not in a heartbeat give up her own life for that child and never give it a second thought. A gentle nature can become a fierce tigress in the wake of concern for a child..and I think that has always been so. I have watched anxiously as my children encountered the disappointments and frustrations of a world I could not control, so have you...and so it has always been...whether that mother was of our time or wore the skirts and bonnets of another time. I have wished a thousand times and more it was I who was so sick, I who was so hurt, I who was so embarrassed, I who was so frightened, I who was so confused, so frustrated, I who felt all those things rather than my child...so have you. The world has always dished out all those negatives, as it will always do, and they are heaped upon our children because we cannot forever keep them in a playpen anymore than our ancestors could keep them swaddled. The negatives may come in different packages, packages that match the worlds we people in our times...but they come...and every mother has wished she could take it upon herself that her child might be spared. I have held my shoulders high with pride when they have achieved, as have you, as has every mother in every time who watched with wonder what this tiny being was growing into. I have watched with pain and fear as they made mistakes, and wished I could have given them with their birth the wisdom of my years as surely as I gave them brown eyes. I have watched with fear and trepidation as my children grow into young adults, and the pain of that growing into an adult with all of the responsibilities an adult must assume is both a source of pride and a source of great worry. And so felt the mothers who sent their sons to a war, who watched children leave not just a home but a country to sail into an unknown, who watched them marry, who watched them dashing into a world often ill prepared, who watched them make the mistakes of youthful immaturity, who wished for just a moment in time that they were once again tripping over her feet and clinging to her skirts instead. "When they are young, they trip on your feet...but when they are older, they trip on your heart", is an oldtime saying...and there is much truth in it. If there was one continuous theme to my prayers the entire time my children were growing up it was, "Dear Lord, please! Just let me live to see them grown!" So important it seemed that I bear out this responsibility, do what I could (often inept) to prepare them for the world, to protect them in their most vulnerable years that I would most willingly have laid down my life when the last child were grown if it were possible to bargain such. I imagine many of you have prayed that same prayer. And so must have felt all the mothers who ever drew breath, and perhaps especially those who lived in days when fatal disease was so much more a part of life, childbirth so dangerous. I imagine my prayers were mere echoes of the fervent ones of the past. No, from the day a mother looks upon the face of that first newborn infant, her life is never again her own, and though my children are yet young people, I do not imagine this will ever change. Though they grow into parents themselves, and grandparents, as long as I draw breath I will wish to protect them, I will want to heap their pain upon myself rather than let them experience whether that is rational or not. I may well step back and allow them to live their own lives, but I will never cease to be anxious, never cease to worry, never cease to feel pride, never cease to look upon them and feel my heart nearly burst with love...never cease to be a mother. And I would have it no other way...nor would you...nor would those mothers of the past. I never fully understood my mother until I was one. And then I felt with a pang how she must have felt in all those situations that I had never understood from her perspective before. I suddenly stepped out on a path of discovery that has lasted these twenty years and more, with all of the changes that accompany a child's growth, realizing at each step how it must have been for my own many years before. And I understood not just my mother, but her mother, and the mother before that... Today is for the mothers, your mother, my mother, ourselves, all the mothers that came before our mothers...all the mothers that ever drew breath upon this earth, in any time, at any place. Styles may change, life patterns may differ, our world may look vastly different and feel vastly different...but a mother is a mother... just a thought, jan
c2000janPhilpot ________________________________________________ (Note: Afternoon Rocking messages are meant to be passed on, meant to be shared...simply share as written without alterations...and in entirety. Thanks, jan) Sunday Afternoon Rocking columns are distributed weekly on the list Sunday Rocking. This is not a "reply to" list, and normally only one message per week will come across it, that being the column. To subscribe send email to Sundayrocking-subscribe@egroups.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2000 11:48:15 -0700 From: "Billie R. McNamara" <knox@tngenweb.org> Subject: [KnoxCoTN] 07 May 2000: Sunday Afternoon Rocking "The Snowball Bush" (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series) Afternoon All, Strange how the simplest things can trigger memories and a bit of wonder, can somehow become entwined with the history of a family. My snowball bush is in bloom. It must have happened overnight. I did not notice it yesterday, but today great round white fluffs are blooming proudly and magnificently on that huge grandmother of a bush, and with the blooms a hundred pictures of a family's past unfolded in my mind. That snowball bush is a wonder, but for many other reasons than only that it is beautiful! That snowball bush is the background for a lot of photographs in the "family archives". I stood in front of it as a teenager and young adult dressed in prom gowns and graduation gowns. My mother stood in front of it posing for Mother's Day pictures. The events of this time of the year were always recorded in front of that bush, because you see...what was once my parents' home is now my own and where I have raised my own children. Once my heart was nearly broken over that snowball bush. A few months after my father's death, when this house stood empty and alone, a tornado broke the cold silence, and came rip-snorting down the middle of the street in front, roaring angrily and tearing up everything in its wake. Trees were twisted from their roots and bushes uprooted. The snowball bush was one of the casualties. It was gone, ripped down to the ground, yanked from its nest, and I was sure we had lost it. Not so.... the miracle of nature to restore its own unfolded, and within a couple of years I noted that snowball bush was starting to push its way out of the ground again in the same spot! I thought I lost it again some years back when we had a terrific ice storm. We sat in the house looking with wonder out the windows at the ethereal landscape outside, thick shimmering layers of ice packaging the trees and bushes outside, a literal fairy kingdom, but a dangerous one...and we jumped and shivered as we heard the cracking and popping of limbs snapping and breaking to the ground. When it was over, we had lost several trees, and the snowball bush was in shambles...beaten to the ground, and broken again to the roots. I thought for sure nature had reclaimed it this time. Wrong again! Hearty and courageous, when spring came, it struggled and shot up again. Now that snowball bush is as huge as it ever was, towering over my head and dominating that corner of the house. It has once again, for a number of years, been the backdrop for a lot of photographs in the "family archives".... pictures of our children all "gussied up" for proms, photographs on graduation day all have the same background, and tradition has restored itself again. No doubt Mother's Day will roll around this year and I will stand with my Mama in front of the same glorious snowball bush that has been the backdrop for May photographs all of these years. So...it isn't "just a bush", "just a spot in the landscape". Far more, it is an integral part of tradition, something to trigger memories, a flood of emotions, and a sense of wonder. I imagine as my children make their homes, and begin to attend to all those "domestic chores" that one pays no attention to until they start settling in more permanent nests of their own, some of them will most likely subconsciously think they "must have a snowball bush" for it to be "home", never fully realizing how this became entwined with their idea of "shoulds to make a home".... just as I thought I had to have a climbing rosebush dripping with red roses on the lattice...just as I would have, if I had raised my children any other place than the traditional home, needed to have planted a snowball bush myself. Sometimes, I think, those of us to whom history and genealogy is so important, might consider the many "little things", the things that never land a spot in genealogy software, never are recounted in the stories of "who begat who" and where folks migrated. We might think now and then on how many of those "little things" are just as meaningful to our sense of tradition as any names or dates...and how those "little things" keep us "rooted" in our sense of place as surely as knowledge of our ancestors. just a thought, jan c2000janPhilpot ________________________________________________ (Note: Afternoon Rocking messages are meant to be passed on, meant to be shared...simply share as written without alterations...and in entirety. Thanks, jan) Sunday Afternoon Rocking columns are distributed weekly on the list Sunday Rocking. This is not a "reply to" list, and normally only one message per week will come across it, that being the column. To subscribe send email to Sundayrocking-subscribe@egroups.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2000 11:50:06 -0700 From: "Billie R. McNamara" <knox@tngenweb.org> Subject: [KnoxCoTN] Catching up <g> Normally, I send out Jan Philpot's wonderful "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" essays when I receive them. But, I've been extraordinarily busy with things that take me away from the computer of late (right now, Sir Spouse is waving a basket full of ripe yellow plums he just picked -- and I need to start plum butter!). I think I'm caught up now -- I'll try to stay caught up in the future! ------------------------------ End of knoxcotn-digest V1 #105 ****************************** |