What We Don’t Take

There are so many things we teach our children. As they are growing, we lead them, we show them, we tell them, we live before them. Then we release them to be who they are. We must think they need to know things to survive on the earth and they will need to teach their young some day. We give them pieces of wisdom and then we ice it with gifts and beauties and nuggets of gold.

As a mama, I don’t remember ever thinking about what my children retained. I wanted them to learn to care for their bodies, their belongings and their responsibilities. I wanted them to learn to be kind and giving and to care for others. I wanted them to know God and to desire Him above all else.Those were the basics. The rest was just icing.

“Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, and when you lie down and when you get up.” -Deuteronomy 11:19

New International Version Bible

Today, I picked up the task, where I left off last month…of sorting and cleaning and finding homes for things that belonged to my mama and daddy. It’s a daunting undertaking, one that has reduced me to tears every time I try to do it. But today, I turned on the music and forged ahead.

The things that got me today were my mother’s collection of glasses and aprons…

They had purchased an extensive variety of drinking glasses in Taiwan. Sets of Martini, Sherry, Brandy, Wine, Beer and Liquor glasses were packed away in original packing with the stickers still on many of them. They were still wrapped in the original disintegrating paper from sixty years ago when they made that trip to Taiwan.

The aprons…oh my…every variety and color…well worn and used to wrap dishes in. I even found a thin ‘decorative’ apron that I remember my mother wearing at holidays over her silk dresses.

I just sat down and bawled my eyes out, thinking of how classy my little mama was. Cooking and serving dinner in her apron and sipping after dinner sherry from the tiny, fragile glass from Taiwan.

I could not wrap my head around how I did NOT do ANY of that myself. Or how in the world I didn’t learn it since I grew up with it my whole life. I didn’t take it as my own.

I am pretty sure these things, that were so engrained in my parents, so worthy to be saved all these years, were beheld as ridiculous and unnecessary by my younger self.

Why wear an apron when you can just as well wipe your hands on your jeans…? And what does it matter what kind of a glass you drink from? My first alcoholic beverage was from a keg out of a car trunk into a plastic cup…

We must, as humans, file away things in our heads as the necessary, the irrelevant and the icing files.

My mama lived a life of necessities and of icing. I cried today, because I did not think the icing was important enough to add to my life.

Here I sit, on the floor, in the middle of my tears puzzling how this all came about. Me, without aprons and brandy glasses, having to decide about the importance of a great wealth of glassware.

It’s absolute irony.

Surely, my Heavenly Father sees me here…in the midst…He saw me back there too, when I disregarded the ‘icing’…He has walked with me the whole way, loving me just as I am and probably chuckling at those aprons that I frowned at. He knew that I would be here today, sorting through a lifetime, trying to honor my parents. He holds my hand, even now, as I try to get up from the dust and pass on the icing to my children and grandchildren…

So, along with letter-writing and book-reading and story-telling, I will add apron wearing and …special glasses for special drinks?

Nahhh…I think I will just stick to the letter writing, book reading and story telling for now…That’s my icing…

“Children, honor your mother and father, that it may be well with you all the days of your lives.” -Ephesians 6:2

King James