Feeling Sweetly Changed.

{February 2009}

Yesterday, my mom bent over the sewing machine at our kitchen table, trying to re-thread the needle that kept unthreading itself. She was squinting and poking – trying really hard. She kept trying, and as she did, she mumbled, “I’m starting to feel like my mother.”

(Menopause does wonders on a woman’s body, I hear. Something about hand-eye coordination, maybe? Something like that?)

I don’t really know, yet. And because I don’t know, I pictured my grandma, thought it all funny and laughed.

I laughed, because last week, I turned on the wrong stove burner until the kitchen was slightly smoky and metal-smelling as the heating elements burnt up the front left burner cover. (Luckily, they’re black. No visible harm, no foul, right?)

I shook my head, giggled a little, then said aloud to myself, “I’m turning into my mother.”

Morgan looked at me, pretended to listen, and then continued rearranging my plastic bowls in the bottom drawer.

And boy, that’s not the only thing. Saturday night, I burnt our Papa Murphey’s pizza to a crusty crisp. I always seem to forget to shut the washer lid and realize it a day later when I find my clothes, unwashed, immersed in water and stagnant grains of soap. I, on occasion, miss important appointments (via forgetting them). We are always late to everything. My brain is fuzzy. I am tired. My skin is pale, and soft in places I wish it weren’t. I look at pictures of me five years ago, and never before has five years aged me like the last five years.

Motherhood. Motherhood has introduced herself to me. And I am forever changed.

Truly, forever changed.

As I lay in bed last night, missing my mom again, I thought past the (sometimes) comical results of aging bodies, aging minds – I thought about the concept of age, and motherhood, womanhood. I thought about how it seems to me that I’m going down the same road my mother has gone down, but just a few years back. And so it is with my grandmother, and my great grandmother. There is comfort in that. Comfort in knowing how much we can learn from those that have gone before us. And that we carry so much of them with us, as we carry on with our lives.

Compared to five years ago, my heart knows a certain depth now that it had never known before. It has changed the way I feel about everything. It has changed my perspective of Heavenly Father. It has increased my gratitude for the Savior. It has helped me see how I am needed here in my home, and how important it is to understand the role of being a mother. My mother defined the very concept for me. She taught it to me every day as I learned, as I grew.

She teaches it still.

Someday, my hands will look like my mom’s do now. And hers will look like my grandma’s.

Such perfection is the circular motion of our Heavenly Father’s plan. It is so beautiful to me.

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Click here for a sweet and very fitting lullaby.