All that lay before..

At the end of March my Mom and Dad would have been married 53 years. They are so amazingly beautiful in this picture..so prepared for the whatever was before. My Mom a little French woman..Marie-Josephe and my Dad, tall blond Dutch man, Adriaan, she peering so confidently out to the camera...how little did she know what lay before. Her history so marred with grief and adventure to live a life before filled with the same. How much she lived in her short 52 years, never speaking her heart language, not being allowed to raise her kids, far away from her beloved mother, alone in a tribe full of everything her French culture abstained from.

In the quiet moments of my mundane, normal life I think of her. I hope she would have been proud of me. She speaks so often in the ipod in my head. The words of encouragement and instruction...lots of instruction. I wasn't so easy to raise...I am sure I would still ruffle her traditional feathers..."zut alore my minette 'eidi"....she did not pronounce the H in my name.

Her deference to my dad, her catholic reverence for all that is sacred, her talent in the kitchen, her profound insight into people, her loyalty to people, her care for the unlovely, her giggling fits at herself, her greener than green thumb...I was/am not like her in too many of these ways. Her quiet confidence in the Holy and tenacity and love for her family as far flung as we were for all her life...she lived and loved so well. But what did she know on this day so many years ago...but still, you can see it in her eyes?

I love it that I am her daughter...I kind of wish I was more like her.