Part 80:  In a tiny apartment in the Bronx, my mother, a ten year old, sat patiently stitching and cross-stitching blue thread through fabric, spelling out the word God. Then Bless, then Home. When I look at that needlepoint, I see the girl who created it, the hope that she would have a loving home. I see innocence. I see a bewildered child whose mother told her she was too fat. I see the child who lives in my mother’s now 95-year-old body. The child who never got the love she craved.

My mother says her mother took her shopping in the Chubby section of Macy’s. Criticized her body. Looked at her with accusing eyes. And then my mother passed it on—the body comments, the criticism, the love withheld—to her daughter. To me.

God Bless Our Home is hanging in the hallway of my home now. I see it as soon as I walk in the door and it reminds me that everyone was someone’s baby. Everyone starts out innocently, wanting to be welcomed, cherished, gazed at with tenderness. It also reminds me that until we acknowledge, accept and somehow find room to welcome the one who didn’t receive that love, we never grow up. We stay toddlers in big bodies.

If I had had my mother’s childhood, if I believed what she believed, I would have treated me the same way. As I learn to be kind to myself, to, as Mary Oliver writes, “love sorrow” and in loving it/her, allow her to grow, I become an adult. I become wise.

Look around. You’ll notice that most people, even in their nineties, are babies in big bodies. It takes fierce kindness to be an adult.

To revisit the entire retrospective, CLICK HERE.

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