Sorry to keep you guys waiting, here is a story about mother's
love which we always take it for granted.
The White Gardenia By Marsha Arons
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Every year on my birthday, from the time I turned 12, one white
gardenia was delivered anonymously to me at my house. There was
never a card or note, and calls to the florist were in vain because
the purchase was always made in cash. After a while, I stopped
trying to discover the identity of the sender. I just delighted in
the beauty and heady perfume of that one magical, perfect white
flower nestled in folds of soft pink tissue paper.
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But I never stopped imagining who the sender might be. Some of my
happiest moments were spent in daydreams about someone wonderful
and exciting, but too shy or eccentric to make known his or her
identity. In my teen years, it was fun to speculate that the sender
might be a boy I had a crush on, or even someone I didn't know who
had noticed me.
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My mother often contributed to my speculations. She'd ask me if
there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness, who might
be showing
appreciation anonymously. She reminded me of the times when I'd
been riding my bike and our neighbor drove up with her car full of
groceries
and children. I always helped her unload the car and made sure the
children didn't run into the road. Or maybe the mystery sender was
the old
man across the street. I often retrieved his mail during the
winter, so he wouldn't have to venture down his icy steps.
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My mother did her best to foster my imagination about the gardenia.
She wanted her children to be creative. She also wanted us to feel
cherished
and loved, not just by her, but by the world at large.
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When I was 17, a boy broke my heart. The night he called for the
last time, I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning,
there was a
message scribbled on my mirror in red lipstick: "Heartily know,
when half-gods go, the gods arrive."
I thought about that quotation from Emerson for a long time, and I
left it where my mother had
written it until my heart healed. When I finally went for the glass
cleaner, my mother knew everything was all right again.
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But there were some hurts my mother couldn't heal. A month before
my high school graduation, my father died suddenly of a heart
attack. My feelings ranged from simple grief to abandonment, fear,
distrust and overwhelming anger that my dad
was missing some of the most important events in my life. I became
completely uninterested in my upcoming graduation, the senior-class
play and the prom - events that I had worked on and looked forward
to. I even considered staying home to attend college instead of
going away as I had
planned because it felt safer.
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My mother, in the midst of her own grief,wouldn't hear of me
missing out on any of these things. The day before my father died,
she and I had gone
shopping for a prom dress and had found a spectacular one - yards
and yards of dotted
Swiss in red, white and blue. Wearing it made me feel like Scarlett
O'Hara. But it was the wrong
size, and when my father died the next day, I forgot all about the
dress.
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My mother didn't. The day before the prom, I found that dress
waiting for me - in the right size. It was draped majestically over
the living room sofa, presented to me artistically and lovingly. I
may not have cared about having a new dress, but my mother
did.
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She cared how we children felt about ourselves. She imbued us with
a sense of the magic in the world, and she gave us the ability to
see beauty even in the face of adversity.
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In truth, my mother wanted her children to see themselves much like
the gardenia - lovely, strong, perfect, with an aura of magic and
perhaps a bit of mystery.
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> My mother died when I was 22, only 10 days after I was
married. That was the year the gardenias stopped coming.
