The Mother-Daughter Vase
In first grade, I made my mother a vase.
Crafted with masking tape, shoe polish, and a repurposed glass jar, it was a new item designed to look vintage. With age comes value and significance, but I didn't know that yet.
Crafted with masking tape, shoe polish, and a repurposed glass jar, it was a new item designed to look vintage. With age comes value and significance, but I didn't know that yet.
The teacher guided us in this creation. First, tear off dozens of pieces of one-inch-wide masking tape that feels like paper, but resembles dry sand and smells vaguely of chemicals. Don’t try to make the ends neat, she said, the more jagged the better.
Next, plaster the entire canister with masking tape positioned every which way. We want mess, we want disorganization. Embrace imperfection. Make it complete enough to cover each square millimeter of the glass, overwhelming and canceling out everything it used to be.
Then, dip old rags or torn bits of t-shirts into dark brown Kiwi-brand shoe polish. Use the globs of stain that smells like gasoline and sweet wax to paint over the taped canister. Watch it change from ecru to sienna, from a known thing into unrecognizable as the color dyes the pale tape. Finally, after a few days of drying, bring this handmade prize home to mom.
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| Photo from communityplaythings.com |
The result looked something like cracked leather, or a monochrome glass mosaic. Because the shoe polish got caught on the edges of the tape, those turned a darker shade and stood out. The brokenness, the unevenness, made it art.
There is a metaphor for motherhood in here, I think. The purging of the old and the refashioning into new. All those edges, all those pieces.
Motherhood requires emptying out of previous contents. Both literally - the act of giving birth - and figuratively - releasing the person who existed before becoming a mother. That self-focused and autonomous individual must be let go to make room for the woman whose child now comes first and foremost.
Then, piece by small piece, motherhood covers up and remakes a woman. The long hours, first from feeding and changing in the early years, then from worrying and rethinking in the older years, break her into pieces and leave miniscule cracks in the fragile spots. Colored by her children's indelible love, the edges of those many pieces begin to stand out. Instead of flaws, they become beauty. This vase isn't the pickle jar or tea canister it was before, and it never will be again. But it's been made into something exceptional in its own right.
My mother, like every mother, was flawed and imperfect. She was multi-layered and complicated, and a life that was already difficult because of poverty and instability was made much harder by her mental and physical illnesses. So the month of May, and the celebration of mothers, is a rollercoaster of emotions for me, carrying my heart up and down and whipping my head from side to side. The painful thoughts and memories are easier to access, but sometimes unearthing the small happy moments hurts too.
Which is this vase I made and gave to her with the pride that all young children exude when gifting mom something? Is it a happy memory of how she must have smiled and drawn me into a hug, or the sharp sting of the work she had to do just to empty, wash, soak, and dry the jar that was for her, which wasn't a particularly useful item for a person who really needed job training, steady medical care, and somewhere soft to lay down her burdens?
I don't know.
It is both happy and sad; too much and not enough. Just like her.
The vase I made for my mom in first grade was lost somewhere among my childhood, and I lost my mom in my adulthood. But I remember her lines, the edges where she ended and I began. I remember the love I painted on her, even when the glass beneath had already shattered. And I remember how she treasured our creation, our mother-daughter vase, as best she could for as long as it lasted.
Then, piece by small piece, motherhood covers up and remakes a woman. The long hours, first from feeding and changing in the early years, then from worrying and rethinking in the older years, break her into pieces and leave miniscule cracks in the fragile spots. Colored by her children's indelible love, the edges of those many pieces begin to stand out. Instead of flaws, they become beauty. This vase isn't the pickle jar or tea canister it was before, and it never will be again. But it's been made into something exceptional in its own right.
My mother, like every mother, was flawed and imperfect. She was multi-layered and complicated, and a life that was already difficult because of poverty and instability was made much harder by her mental and physical illnesses. So the month of May, and the celebration of mothers, is a rollercoaster of emotions for me, carrying my heart up and down and whipping my head from side to side. The painful thoughts and memories are easier to access, but sometimes unearthing the small happy moments hurts too.
Which is this vase I made and gave to her with the pride that all young children exude when gifting mom something? Is it a happy memory of how she must have smiled and drawn me into a hug, or the sharp sting of the work she had to do just to empty, wash, soak, and dry the jar that was for her, which wasn't a particularly useful item for a person who really needed job training, steady medical care, and somewhere soft to lay down her burdens?
I don't know.
It is both happy and sad; too much and not enough. Just like her.
The vase I made for my mom in first grade was lost somewhere among my childhood, and I lost my mom in my adulthood. But I remember her lines, the edges where she ended and I began. I remember the love I painted on her, even when the glass beneath had already shattered. And I remember how she treasured our creation, our mother-daughter vase, as best she could for as long as it lasted.
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