- “Cairns Esplanade”
My mother taught me many things about love. One is that love allows one to step outside of her or himself and see the other person’s perspective, particularly if that other person is your child.
As women we are expected to make room for everyone at the table even if that means we do not get to sit down.
As a woman, who is also the mother of three daughters, my experience as a daughters has taught me that it is imperative that I not only make room at the table for my family, which includes my daughters, but that I also enlarge that table to the best of my ability. If women are expected to give, then their mothers, our mothers must teach us how to give.
The best way I see of doing that is by giving immensely to my daughters, stepping outside of myself, viewing life from their perspective and using what I see and learn to expand the table at which my daughters and I sit.
One of the greatest gifts of stepping outside of one’s self and widening your view on life is that it not only provides you with those elements needed to enlarge the table of your heart–patience, gratitude, humility, awe–but in so doing, you add space at that table in which for you to have a seat too.
My mother gave, but the kept track of all she gave. My mother grew up during the Depression, a time of great scarcity for the entire world.
Her penchant for holding back, keeping closed her heart, and pessimism towards generosity of physical things but mainly spirit, demonstrated not only her incredible fear of becoming once more a person who lacked, but more importantly, how in not being able to open up to others she lacked a place at the table she so often and so generously prepared for others.
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