fermented wine

by Elouise

pxby-white-flower-spring

life flows through her veins
fermented wine of past dreams
melts my eyes

***

This week was high-jacked. Not by force, but by my desire to spend time with our adult daughter. Her visit coincided with my husband’s determination to get rid of unnumbered books from our academic collection. Most stored on shelves in our large attic.

Deep in the attic, behind multiple shelves of books, he uncovered a mother lode. All belonging to our daughter. Boxes full of school papers, reports, works of a budding artist (she’s a graphic artist as well as a musician), stuffed animals, posters, programs, correspondence, and other memorabilia I’d saved for her.

This week she sat in our relatively small den surrounded by boxes, going through each item. Laughing, sighing, reminiscing, showing and telling, sorting and sifting for keepers. Of which there were an abundance. A paper trail that told the story of her life.

Unexpectedly, the paper trail confirmed the nature and content of our daughter’s character, and the trajectory of her life as an artistic type. Her life has had its ups and downs, and it wasn’t always clear how things would turn out. Or whether our parenting of her–especially mine as her mother–had helped, hindered, or encouraged her.

Thankfully, going through this treasure trove did more than confirm her nature, giftedness, determination and joyful creativity. It also gave me assurance I didn’t know I was looking for until I found it this week. I always wondered whether my mothering helped or hurt her.

I’m an expert on what I think I did wrong as her mother. I found out, though, that what I got 100% right was so simple I didn’t even know I was doing it. I kept boxes for each of our two children. Into each box I put anything I thought they might enjoy seeing when they were older. It was that simple!

Given my personality, I erred on the side of putting in too much material instead of too little. Before dropping it in, I penciled on the back of each paper item our daughter’s name, age and a brief note about when or where the item originated.

Tears, laughter, memories, hoots and hollers of recognition — all that and more because of those old pieces of paper that capture in vivid detail our daughter’s personality, creativity, and musicality. She is a strikingly beautiful forest flower–grown up now as her own wild woman.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 17 February 2017
Photo found at Pixabay.com

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