I never thought I’d be looking at the receipt of a designer dress for close to $1,800 and questioning my own mother’s priorities. Something that in my mind goes beyond simply fabric and is narrowed down to selection of that fabric. Kind of a choice she could have made when she could have used her son’s college tuition.
My mother, who is now 70, has been always very practical. She made five kids on a small income and always kept family first and always made sure we had what we had. She made sacrifices for us: extra shifts to pay for our school trips or those same old coat she had worn for ten out of twelve years just for us to always have new one. Her and I never grew up together and she never purchased anything extravagant for herself as I was growing up.
I was stunned when I found out she had spent virtually two thousand dollars on a designer dress for her to wear to her book club once in a while and to the occasional luncheon.
I was well aware, if not actually hoping, but maybe assuming, that she would provide something toward my son’s education. Every penny helps as he’s just about to start college. You try to figure out what tuition, books, housing cost will be. I never thought she’d do all of it, a bit of help would have helped. I now wondered what happened to my $1,800, sitting now in her closet, worn once or twice, while my son would have to rack up even more student loans.
I brought up my frustration very carefully. That afternoon I went over for coffee with mom, and changed the subject to seeing the dress you bought. It’s beautiful, but… At least I guess I don’t understand. It would’ve helped Jason go off to college.”
With her cup down, gently, she took a slow sip of her tea. “I know,” she said. “And I thought about that.”
But it merely infuriated me more that she was calm. “Then why?”
She put down her hands in her lap, drew in a deep breath. “It is because for seventy years I have been more than a mother, I have never been less.” I’ve always done everything in my life so that the kids don’t get to know. “I didn’t sacrifice little things I wanted or things I wanted at all, without second thought.”
Lost in years of memories I never fully considered, she paused her gaze distant. “But now… now I’m seventy. My children are grown. I like my grandchildren and will do all I can to help them. Yet for one time only, I wanted to do something solely for me. A feeling of special. It was something that made me remember that I am still a person — not just a mother and a grandmother.”
I couldn’t hang onto the words or anything I would say.
I had never thought about how much she’d give. I had never thought she should ever have this, but maybe she here had earned it.
I’d been so focused on my own drudgery and thinking that family was everything that I hadn’t noticed that she had already done more than enough for her family. She had spent decades not hesitating to put us first. She was just asking for one thing and now, for herself.
I went home that night and pondered it long and hard. Was I still upset? A little. Did I still want her to have picked to help my son? Of course. For the first time, I saw the situation how it appeared to her.
She wasn’t just my mother. She was more than my son’s grandmother. She had given her entire life to us, and now for the first time in seventy years she had decided to give something in return to herself.
Could that have been selfish, or was it not?
