Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: mother

  • The Coupon Queen

    It was the first Easter after his mother had passed. He was wondering how he was going to make it through Easter without her. On the week leading up to that first Easter without his mother, he was in the grocery store on a very long check out line. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and it was an elderly woman handing him a coupon as she said to him, “Young man, I noticed the cereal you are buying. I have a coupon for it.”

    No one had ever done that for him in all of his years of grocery shopping. And when he reached out to get the coupon from her, he looked into her eyes. He really felt like his mother was present. The woman did not look like his mother, but he felt his mother’s presence. It was so real, so palpable, so undeniable….

    His mother was a child of Italian immigrants from the Great Depression, so she really loved saving money. Every Sunday she would take the newspaper and she would cut all of the coupons. She would even cut coupons for items she herself did not buy. She would leave them on the grocery store shelves next to the items for other people to find and to use.

    His mother was not a reader, she did not do puzzles, she did not knit. What his mother did for fun was cut coupons. She was the coupon queen!

  • A Novel Mother’s Day

    Mother’s Day was this next Sunday.

    While working on her Mother’s Day service for the sweet little church where she was to be guest speaker, including the “Observing Your Feminine Teacher” information from An Experiential Guidebook based on The Celestine Prophecy had her in deep process.

      You got some positive qualities from your mother:  Like my mother, I am…

      “Outgoing and hard working,” she wrote down.

      You also got some negative qualities you got from your mother: Like my mother, I am…

      “Judgmental and critical,” she noted with some pangs of guilt as memories flooded her mind..

      From your mother, you learned that in order to succeed, you should: ___________( fill in the blank). These are beliefs and values that influenced many of your decisions either positively or negatively.

      That was an easy one, ” Work hard.”

      From observing your mother’s life, what do you want to be more of? For what are you grateful to your mother? For what would you be willing to forgive your mother? From your list of what was missing from your mother’s life, what, if anything, have you chosen to develop?

      “What was missing from my mother’s life was a spiritual ease, a genuine sense that her life had been well-lived. I am willing to forgive her for teaching me to be judgmental and critical, especially of my own life,” tears filled her eyes as she wrote these words.

    She was reading What Alice Forgot, a novel by Liane Moriarty’s – a novel for god’s sake. The protagonist suffered a head injury and lost ten years of memory. The earlier version of herself loved her husband, but she woke from the injury in the middle of an ugly divorce. Asking him what went wrong, he replied:

    “I’d be at work, where people respected my opinions. And then I’d come home and it was like I was the village idiot. I’d pack the dishwasher the wrong way. I’d pick the wrong clothes for the children. I stopped offering to help. It wasn’t worth the criticism.” (p. 424 What Alice Forgot, a novel by Liane Moriarty)

    The previous day she had written in her journal, “I am willing to know if it is highest good. That will be my new seven- syllable personal mission statement: IF IT IS THE HIGHEST GOOD.”

    A novel for God’s sake. Definitely a novel Mother’s Day, and such a beautiful gift from her mother in heaven.

    “A Mother is one
    who can take the place of all others
    but whose place no one else can take.”
    ~ Wise Old Irish Words

  • Kindle!

    She gifted her mother-in-law a Kindle (digital reading device), but her mother-in-law (being of the older generation) never used it.
    kindle

    Several times after the death of her mother-in-law, she noticed her own Kindle would be on in the middle of the night, although she always thought she was sure to turn it off after reading in bed before falling asleep.

    One night, her husband had a dream about his mother. Waking from the dream, he got up to go use the bathroom.

    When he came back to bed, his wife’s Kindle was turned on!