In the first article, I recounted that most difficult day in 1967 when I learned that my younger sister (my only sibling) and I were motherless. Our mother had lost her battle with breast cancer. I was only six, my sister four.
In the many years that have elapsed since then I was forced to assume the role of mother (to my sibling). For those motherless mothers who found themselves having to self-teach the fine art of mothering in order to provide for younger siblings, you will identify.
I cooked and cleaned, I nagged and yelled, I worried and fretted. This was not a role for which I auditioned. Rather, it was thrust on me with a suddenness from which I've only begun to recover.
Now, my sweet Hannah, five years old, is under the tutelage of a practiced provider, a child-mother prodigy, who began her craft at an age not substantially greater than Hannah's.
She is, like me, almost obsessively responsible. Born from having been reared by a mother who, as a matter of survival honed her skills at caretaking from an early age. This is only one legacy I have handed down to Hannah.
Her teachers inform me that she is the one who takes charge, who makes sure that each thing is in its place, that each child has her/his fare share. She hovers and directs, but she does so lovingly. She has many friends.
What is perhaps the single most iimportant possession that she can have, in my opinion, is a memorable history with her mother. As for myself, I have very few memories of my mother: I know of her only those few stories shared with me by those who knew and loved her.
The anectodes about my mother, for whom my own daughter was named, are rare and revered. Unfortunately, these tales cannot survive the transition: my mothers 's friends and family cannot relay the stories with the singular perspective of a daughter's telling. These packaged memories, while illustrative of the kind of woman that was my mother are, alas, not my memories.
No doubt this is what drives me to chronicle, to archive, to record for posterity the intimate, funny, sad, and wondrous moments of my daughter's life. In so doing, I do not simply photograph a birtday party or snap shots at Thanksgiving, but say to Hannah "We lived and How!"
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