letting go – PurpleSage41

Leftovers take many forms, even if the ones we will be most mindful pf this week is leftover food from Thursday’s Thanksgiving meal. Tangible leftovers invite both creative re-use and letting go.

In my growing up home, there were no food leftovers at home except for Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas ham. My mother always calculated how much she needed to feed three women of normal appetites and one son growing to six feet five, and it was all eaten. In my family with a husband and three daughters, none of us big eaters, there were always creative ways to incorporate leftovers into soups and casseroles and sandwiches.

However, there were fabric leftovers in my birth family, because my mother made our pajamas, shirts, blouses, dresses, skirts, and even tailored jackets. Later, she coached me and my sister when we made our wedding gowns and bridesmaids’ dresses. At age seven I learned to use scraps for doll clothes, then was gently guided into making my own clothes. My mother used scraps for potholders and quilts, and had a fierce competition with my mother-in-law in outfitting my daughters’ Barbie dolls. When the scraps got too small or too scrappy, there were always cleaning rags. I have no recollection of paper towels in my mother’s household.

Leftover fabric can make something beautiful or useful or both. I have done a lot of quilting, table runners and potholders and occasionally actual quilts, mostly from leftover fabrics. In fact, the origin of quilting as an art form was to make good use of leftover fabric scraps. When I retired from sewing, except for mending, altering, and making gift bags, I gave my fabric stash to a friend of my granddaughter who was in college majoring in costume design.

Twelve years ago, I learned about another kind of leftovers that can be recombined in a different kind of quilt, with spare parts carefully recycled in other ways. Many of us are awash in household possessions—furniture, decorations, closets filled with clothes that no longer fit or that we just don’t wear, cupboards full of extra dishes and cooking gadgets, and for me, books. Sometimes the answer to abundance run amok is a bigger house with more closets and bookshelves. But as we get older, a better answer is often a smaller house with fewer possessions to look after, which invites creative use of the leftovers. This retreat from “hoyuseholding” is a useful lesson from Hinduism, which is very attuned to the different challenges and expectations at different stages of life. Old age is the time to let go of possessions and responsibilities and concentrate on matters of the spirit. Less is more, but we don’t want to waste those possessions we are letting go.

My friend Fran and I taught a continuing education class and wrote a book together about downsizing and decluttering after 50. She was a former Clemson Extension agent and a realtor, with lots of experience in decluttering houses about to be sold. I knew more about writing than decluttering, but I learned a lot about decluttering when I left my big house where we lived for 46 years to move to a townhouse in a retirement community. The townhouse is furnished mostly with things that came from our big house, but I couldn’t begin to cram it all in.

If there are fifty ways to leave a lover,there are almost that many ways to dispose of National Geographics, porch furniture, tools, 33 RPM albums, carousels of slides, furniture, sailing trophies, all the leftovers of being married for 53 years to a loveable pack rat. The National Geographic magazines went to a home schooler I found on Freecycle. I gave Carl’s framing supplies to a young man whose mother was a fellow sailor of my husband and had taught junior sailing classes with him. I met people through freecycle who worked for Ulbrich Steel in Oconee County and wanted to know if we were related. Yes, but not in regular contact, because Carl’s father was the black sheep of the family. He had not only moved out of the home town of Wallingford, but had, horror of horrors, married a Protestant.

When Fran and I taught the decluttering and downsizing class, we found that people had the most trouble letting go of objects that were the carriers of memories, because they are afraid that the memories would disappear along with the objects that call those memories back into the present. Sometimes I chose to let thrift shops and recycling centers do the work for me, and trusted the universe to keep the memories. Other times, I knew where the right home was for a treasured item and was pleased to help it carry those memories to a good place. I emailed my three daughters with pictures of Carl’s sailing trophies, all practical items destined to be used– etched glass salad bowls, mugs and pitchers. They opted to take most of them. My middle daughter Carla claimed so many treasures to take back to New Jersey that we had to meet in Southern Virginia, to unpack my car and fill up hers with everything from 33 rpm records to end tables made by her father to snorkeling gear. These were among the leftovers of a lifetime of memories, and a good way to let go.

Some of our leftovers are the actual memories, of holidays, travel, milestones, joys and sorrows shared stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. May your leftovers of all kinds find a good home in a hungry belly, a warm quilt, a different use, wherever or wherever they can still be useful and meaningful to someone. Let us also share our leftovers of mind and heart with one another, recalling the joy in the memories they embodied.

I know mothers who are deeply engaged in their children’s lives. I don’t mean mothers of young children or adolescents. I mean mothers of adults, children who have graduated from college, moved away from home, got married, and had children of their own. I am happy for them and hope that there is much joy in their relationships. I love my daughters and granddaughters, but I am not that kind of mother, and I think the feeling is mutual.

The separation process is challenging for mothers and daughters. As daughter of a mother, mother of three daughters, and grandmother of four more, I have experienced it first and second-hand. My own mother lived to age 92, the last 25 after moving to the town where I lived and wanting to be more a part of my life than I was willing to accept.

It begins when an adolescent girl says in some way, I have my own vision of my future and it’s not the same as yours. My mother, who was raised in a very post-Victorian world, thought that every woman should a) get married, have children, manage a household and expect a man to support her and b) acquire a marketable skill in case she needed to go back t work. Every girl of my generation heard the options: teacher, nurse, secretary. When my mother offered those options to me at 15, I said, I think I will be an engineer. (Source: Sputnik had just leaped into space, and my father, from whom she had been separated for 13 years, was an engineer—although he had no involvement with our family. Eventually, I became an academic economist.)

I wanted to marry and have children, but my focus was on a professional career, not a backup strategy. My mother was a social butterfly in high school, while I was a born academic who knocked the charts off standardized tests. I dated faithfully to appease my mother, but my heart wasn’t in it until I met my future husband in college. She also passed on the traditional belief that sons were more important because they carried on the family name and had to support their families, so it was especially important that they get an education, while it might be wasted by a woman. Betty Friedan, where were you? (Fortunately, my brother was not academically inclined, and went to a technical high school instead. And I worked while in high school to save enough for two years of college, but scholarships took care of it anyway.)

That’s not an uncommon story of the women of my generation, the pre-boomers (I was born in 1941) and early boomers. It was easier for my daughters, who grew up with the expectation of careers and marriage and maybe children.

The other part of the story was conflicting values. My mother was understandably cautious, and not adventuresome. She didn’t get a driver’s license till she was 55, and flew on a plane for the first time in 1961 to visit her first grandchild. My sister and I were both counting the days to when we could leave our hometown and see the world. She was a Republican. I always joked that she was so relieved that I came home from my first year of collage neither a Communist nor pregnant that she didn’t mind that I had become a Democrat. (Many years later she discovered that her social and political values were more Democratic than Republican.)

But in other ways I am my mother’s daughter. I have her sense of humor and passion for writing. I like to sing hymns around the house. I am a pretty good seamstress, a skill she taught me. I am a better, more adventurous cook than she would even consider being. I share her love but not her skill at growing plants. She had a passion for politics which both of us inherited from her grandmother who marched for women’s suffrage in 1913. We both could play the piano by ear and loved cats,

Before she arrived here in 1976, mother had lived with my brother and his wife, which did not work out well for anyone concerned. Over time, I managed to set boundaries that allowed us to peacefully coexist in my small Southern college town. The day she died, she confided to me that the last 25 years in this place 900 miles from home were the happiest years of her life. I worked hard to get her to let go of mothering me in order to enjoy what I have at age 82—the freedom to restructure life after the intensive stage of mothering, to be myself again, to set my own schedule, to have a cordial and loving but non-invasive relationship with my daughters sons-in-law, and grandchildren but my own social life and my own friends, causes, and communities.

My daughters are almost there. The oldest had only one child, who is in a slow transition from college to finding her place in the world, but it is happening. My second daughter is married but has no children, although she is a much beloved aunt. I had a beloved aunt too, also without children, that my sister and I adored. And my children had such an aunt too, although she did have two adopted sons. Perhaps at a certain age we need to cease being their mothers and become aunts instead! My youngest daughter has three children and is still involved in their lives, but change is headed her way. All my daughters have careers, adult friends, community activities, and supportive spouses.

I look back on my mother’s life, its challenges and disappointments, her identity defined primarily as a wife and mother and grandmother. I am grateful that I was born in the first generation of both-and instead of either-or, a professional career and a family. I am also grateful that I found a husband who clearly stated he did NOT want me to live vicariously through him (I said okay!). My life after parenting has been full of opportunities, challenges, and adventures. As a mother, I am grateful that my daughters could lead both/and lives, and that my granddaughters are all on track to do the same.

Tag: letting go

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