Unfinished Business

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This is a picture of an owl embroidery kit my mom bought and worked on in 1972. I stole it from her basement in 2008. I confessed about stealing it a few weeks ago while I wished her a Happy Mother's Day over the phone.

I described the embroidery to her and she recalled it with perfect clarity. She said Dad was in his first year of dental school and she needed something to fill the nights so she bought Mr. Owl. She started it, had her first baby SUZETTE and began using her evenings to sew for money. She sewed crib sets, crib canopies, homemade sheets, car seat liners, cradle liners...basically everything sold on Etsy nowadays. (She still has some full-fledged-Grade-A-for-Awesome vintage ric rac left from those sewing jobs, too.) The next paid gig was to manually machine embroider the Texas Longhorn and Oklahoma Sooner logos on to shirts. Dad said he can still recall studying to the sound of the green Bernina with its pedal to the metal. Then her second baby was born MELISSA and that baby screamed all night and slept all day and was a living nightmare.

I asked her if I was the reason she never finished the owl. She said I wasn't. It makes me feel a little better about being her worst baby.

Soon she was a mother of five. That circus included shuttling between RBHS, Jeff Junior, and Shepard Boulevard Elementary for various sports and academic clubs, piano lessons, braces, birthday parties, slumber parties, recitals, show and tell, summer school, and getting Jingles groomed. She probably spent 38% of her midlife in the van. Kids started leaving home and she worked for Dr. D for twelve years. Following retirement she and my dad served a church mission in the Dominican Republic for 18 months. Nearly the moment she arrived back on American soil she was diagnosed with cancer and spent the next two years recovering from surgery and radiation. And here we are today. Does she want the owl back? No. Her sewing season was interrupted by baby birds and now that the nest is empty she has different interests.

I love this unfinished owl, complete with a needle parked right where my mom left it. It symbolizes the morph that motherhood causes.

My middle name is List Maker. Post-it notes are an appendage of my brain and I live to get things done. Mr. Owl hoots at me to accept that I am never going to finish the lists from my thirtysomethings. He also hints I'll be writing different lists later in life so I might as well relax about my current losses. If I were as wise as an owl, I would recognize there will be times when life demands I park the proverbial needle I am sewing my personal desires with.

When I graduated from BYU, my mentor Linda Sullivan relayed the quote in the Polaroid. I have never forgotten it, yet, I feel like I'm just beginning to understand it. If you give something meaningless away you simply have less stuff. [DIVISION] If you give something important away sometimes it returns to you bigger and stronger than a force of nature. [MULTIPLICATION]

Moms do a lot of division. They divide peanut butter and jelly and budgets and spare minutes and attention. Division might be akin to drudgery. More importantly, moms multiply. They enlarge life and magnify the purpose, skills, and self-esteems of those they nurture. They smooth and shape, sow and reap, rinse and repeat. Multiplication leads to miracles.

NOTE TO MY OLDER SELF: 

Dear Older, More-Wrinkled List Maker,

Someday you will be able to see a visible result of all the moments you spent multiplying. The unfathomable sum of your lifetime of service will astound you to the point that a half-finished owl will seem very trivial. Sometimes it takes unfinished business to prove that you were, indeed, working in the right business. BTW, enjoy those new lists.

Love, Whippersnapper

*So trends repeat themselves every 30 years? Owls were hot then and are hotter now. Everyone get ready for mustard yellow and olive green appliances. Coincidentally, Suzette grew up to own a custom baby bedding business.