Mother's Desk
I'm sitting at my mother's desk, the one she willed to me when she died 10 years ago. It's a lady's secretary that I've loved since I was a child: dark-red mahogany, with a writing leaf that folds down to reveal rows of cubbyholes and tiny drawers-even a sliding secret compartment.
I can remember being just tall enough to see above the leaf as Mother sat writing letters. I would stand by her chair staring at the accessories - ink bottle, pens and pencils, letter opener, piles of smooth white paper. And I decided that the act of writing must be the most delightful thing in the world.
During her final illness half a century later, Mother was explicit that the desk was to go to me. There were items reserved for my sister and my brother, "But the desk," she'd repeat, "is for Elizabeth."
I sensed Mother's way of communicating with this particular gift. Communication with my mother was what I'd craved for 50 years. Gentle, gracious, giving, Mother shied away from putting feelings into words.
Because she was brought up in the Victorian belief that emotions were private affairs and nice people said only nice things, she was uncomfortable if conversation grew heated. I never saw her angry, never saw her cry. It made for a tranquil home but, for me, especially as a teenager, a frustrating one. I knew Mother loved me; she expressed it in action. But I wanted words too. I yearned for heart-to-heart talks. I wanted Mother to ask me not what had happened at school, but how I felt about it.
Those mother-daughter talks never happened, and a gulf of mutual disapproval opened between us. I was "too emotional," she lived "on the surface." She was willing to accept the situation, concentrating on the nice things in our relationship. I was not.
Over the years, as I married and raised my own family, these nice things were many indeed. I loved the equilibrium Mother brought on visits to our home, loved her sense of humor, loved her to sit at the piano filling the house with Chopin and Brahms. And still I kept trying to draw from her what she could not give - a sharing of the deep places of her hurt.
My last and most strenuous effort came 25 years ago in the form of a letter. Thinking that Mother might be less threatened reading about personal matters than speaking of them, I set down my feelings on paper. The letter was only one page but it took me all day to write. I told Mother that I loved her. I thanked her for the harmonious home she had created for her husband and children. I asked her to forgive me for being critical. With careful wording, I asked her to let me know in any way she chose that she did forgive me. Then I took the letter to the post office - I couldn't trust a mailbox with so momentous a message - and waited eagerly for her reply.
And of course none came. Eagerness gradually turned to disappointment, then as the months passed, resignation, and finally a strange peace about it. I don't understand the role of confession in God's ecology, but it was as though by confessing my own failure and asking forgiveness I'd fulfilled my half of an equation whose resolution was up to him.I couldn't be sure, of course, that the letter had ever gotten to Mother; mail does get misdirected, mail trucks have accidents. I only know that having written it I was able at last to stop trying to make Mother into someone she was not. For the last 15 years of her life we enjoyed a relationship on her terms - light, affectionate, cheerful.
That's why the gift of the desk said so much on behalf of a lady who said so little about how she felt. Her writing desk said, as she'd never been able to, that she was pleased writing was my chosen work. It acknowledged, as reticence prevented her from saying, that my childhood love affair with this particular piece of furniture had been the first nudge in that direction.
There remained the matter of getting the desk from Massachusetts to our house outside New York City. For a while my sister stored it in her home near Boston, till family members could rent a U-Haul and drive it down. It stayed in our attic for nearly a year while we redid one of the children's now-vacant rooms as a study. At last we moved the desk into the room where I'm sitting now. Lovingly I wiped and polished the little drawers and cubbyholes, dusty from months of storage. I even pulled out the secret compartment to dust, and found papers inside. A photograph of my father, family wedding announcements - and a one-page letter, folded and refolded many times.
"Send me a reply, Mother," the letter asks, "in whatever way you choose." Mother, you always chose the act that speaks louder than words.
Mother's Desk by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1998 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions Editor@guideposts.org.
For more true stories of hope and inspiration, visit www.guideposts.org.
I can remember being just tall enough to see above the leaf as Mother sat writing letters. I would stand by her chair staring at the accessories - ink bottle, pens and pencils, letter opener, piles of smooth white paper. And I decided that the act of writing must be the most delightful thing in the world.
During her final illness half a century later, Mother was explicit that the desk was to go to me. There were items reserved for my sister and my brother, "But the desk," she'd repeat, "is for Elizabeth."
I sensed Mother's way of communicating with this particular gift. Communication with my mother was what I'd craved for 50 years. Gentle, gracious, giving, Mother shied away from putting feelings into words.
Because she was brought up in the Victorian belief that emotions were private affairs and nice people said only nice things, she was uncomfortable if conversation grew heated. I never saw her angry, never saw her cry. It made for a tranquil home but, for me, especially as a teenager, a frustrating one. I knew Mother loved me; she expressed it in action. But I wanted words too. I yearned for heart-to-heart talks. I wanted Mother to ask me not what had happened at school, but how I felt about it.
Those mother-daughter talks never happened, and a gulf of mutual disapproval opened between us. I was "too emotional," she lived "on the surface." She was willing to accept the situation, concentrating on the nice things in our relationship. I was not.
Over the years, as I married and raised my own family, these nice things were many indeed. I loved the equilibrium Mother brought on visits to our home, loved her sense of humor, loved her to sit at the piano filling the house with Chopin and Brahms. And still I kept trying to draw from her what she could not give - a sharing of the deep places of her hurt.
My last and most strenuous effort came 25 years ago in the form of a letter. Thinking that Mother might be less threatened reading about personal matters than speaking of them, I set down my feelings on paper. The letter was only one page but it took me all day to write. I told Mother that I loved her. I thanked her for the harmonious home she had created for her husband and children. I asked her to forgive me for being critical. With careful wording, I asked her to let me know in any way she chose that she did forgive me. Then I took the letter to the post office - I couldn't trust a mailbox with so momentous a message - and waited eagerly for her reply.
And of course none came. Eagerness gradually turned to disappointment, then as the months passed, resignation, and finally a strange peace about it. I don't understand the role of confession in God's ecology, but it was as though by confessing my own failure and asking forgiveness I'd fulfilled my half of an equation whose resolution was up to him.I couldn't be sure, of course, that the letter had ever gotten to Mother; mail does get misdirected, mail trucks have accidents. I only know that having written it I was able at last to stop trying to make Mother into someone she was not. For the last 15 years of her life we enjoyed a relationship on her terms - light, affectionate, cheerful.
That's why the gift of the desk said so much on behalf of a lady who said so little about how she felt. Her writing desk said, as she'd never been able to, that she was pleased writing was my chosen work. It acknowledged, as reticence prevented her from saying, that my childhood love affair with this particular piece of furniture had been the first nudge in that direction.
There remained the matter of getting the desk from Massachusetts to our house outside New York City. For a while my sister stored it in her home near Boston, till family members could rent a U-Haul and drive it down. It stayed in our attic for nearly a year while we redid one of the children's now-vacant rooms as a study. At last we moved the desk into the room where I'm sitting now. Lovingly I wiped and polished the little drawers and cubbyholes, dusty from months of storage. I even pulled out the secret compartment to dust, and found papers inside. A photograph of my father, family wedding announcements - and a one-page letter, folded and refolded many times.
"Send me a reply, Mother," the letter asks, "in whatever way you choose." Mother, you always chose the act that speaks louder than words.
Mother's Desk by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1998 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions Editor@guideposts.org.
For more true stories of hope and inspiration, visit www.guideposts.org.