This post has nothing to do with zen practice. This post has nothing to do with teaching. I suppose in some ways it's what a blogpost is supposed to be: a web-based log of someone's thoughts or feelings.
I'm writing this post because when I opened my sister's email tonight, it ended with my mom's name. Seeing my mom's name made me cry, just a little.
My mom died when I was little- 6, to be exact. My mom died when she was 41, which, it turns out, is also little. I'm finding this out because I'm turning 41 myself this week, and seeing that 41 is really young.
I've been thinking about this a lot this week, and in these months leading up to my birthday. I've been seeing my mom as a person, a woman who was 41, who had three little kids (my brother was 9, my sister 12) and who liked to make chocolate mousse.
I had asked my sister to email me my mom's recipe for chocolate mousse. It was one of her specialties. She also liked Grasshopper Pie (apparently she would go to Chiacgo for the weekend, shop, and then have Grasshopper Pie made with Frango mints as a treat).
When I read the recipe, I thought it was kind of weird. It wasn't anywhere near as complicated as I had expected chocolate mousse to be and I acually wondered if it would work. But that wasn't what hit me, that wasn't what made me cry. What hit me was her name. What hit me was this person, this person who had written down her recipe for chocolate mousse, and had signed her name to it. I just pictured her, writing down the recipe and signing it. I can't really explain why this is important or why this makes me cry, just that she was a person, making chocolate mousse, and signing her name.
I pictured her, in our kitchen, making the mousse and writing it out on a recipe card, saving it for future use. And I guess in some ways, I'm picturing myself. I write recipes. I save them for future use. I know that feeling of wanting to keep a good recipe. And maybe that is what is hitting me: her earnestness, her signing her name, her making the recipe her own, her attempt to hold on to something, to keep it for future use, the image of her, being young, living in the present but planning for the future.
I just... it turns out that she was little too, that she was a person too, that she had hopes and fears and desires and friends and that she lived.
And it's really sad that she died, that she didn't get to keep on living, that her life stopped. And it's weird that my life is still going on, that I am going to be older than her, that I am going to experience things that she never got to experience. I will be 42 next year. She will never be 42.
I don't know what else to say about this except that it makes me sad and confused to surpass my mother. It's nice to know that she was young. It's nice to imagine her in our house, all healthy and busily making chocolate mousse for her friends but it's a really weird feeling to begin to see myself as older than that, to think that I will get older than her, that I will age in a way that she never did and that she is becoming younger than me.
HUGS
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