Around eleven-thirty last evening I received a text from our youngest daughter stating that she and her schoolmates had arrived safely in Japan.
“We’re here and everything is good,” she had written. “I love you,” along with her code for letting me know she sent the text.
I wrote back, “I’m so happy for you and your friends. Thanks for letting me know. Hugs and kisses. I love you too, mom.” I too included my symbol signifying I had sent the text.
Both I, and our youngest daughter have a code that we always include in our text to indicate we are truly the one sending the text with our name.
I dreaded receiving letters from my mother during college. So much so that I hardly every opened them, instead holding them up to the light and trying to read them through the envelope.
Is that crazy, or what?
If I ever tore open the envelope, which I often did, I could not resist unfolding the pages and reading her words, a point at which life, for the moment, and my emotions would spiral downhill.
My mother’s letters were not uplifting. She usually wrote complaining about the money I was spending, the amounts being too much.
She spent a lot towards raising me. But she gave me little.
I fear that most of us westerners do not understand just how much it costs to nurture and guide children into adulthood.
Then again, perhaps we do. And thus we resent being unable to give in abundance to ourselves and our children as well.
Life, in most cases, causes us to choose. And I am not simply addressing the financial cost.
There is the sheer money required for the necessities–food, clothing, shelter, etc.
And then there are the intangibles, those abstract entities that comprise Maslow’s highest level of needs–love, acceptance, appreciation, etc.
You cannot give others what you do not possess within. And if you somehow produce it, what you yield over is usually fake and passed on in resentment.
This applies to both the tangible lower level of needs and those highest ones.
My mother was not rich. And neither was she poor. We owned our home and she taught school.
She also owned land inherited in the wake of my father’s death.
Regarding Maslow’s highest level of needs she was incredibly impoverished.
Sadly so, I realize now.
No special way of greeting each other in correspondences existed between us.
Nor did we possess a unique code to indicate the message was authentically ours.
I can only imagine the pain, terrifically unconscious that my mother endured, not only as a mother with a daughter, but as a human individual.
I miss her as I write this blog post.
I wish I could say I love you, and that she, like our youngest daughter, would know truly how much.
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