Window With A View

My view this weekend was not from my mother's house but from the windows and decks of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts where writers from across the state and beyond gathered for a weekend of workshops, seminars and readings. We gathered in the rooms of this artist's retreat and shared our work. On this weekend, this weekend of words and stories, a common thread emerged. The thread of mothers and daughters. Not just mothers and daughters, but the pain daughters live with when their mother's leave, regardless of how they leave or where they go.

This relationship, this intertwining of lives that mothers and daughters share runs deep among us, molds us, shapes us into the women we are and the women we will become. We open our mouths and our mother's words flow out, we look in the mirror and are surprised when our mother looks back at us, then turn to our daughters and hope they hold some understanding of the amazing people they are. Hope we have given enough to them so they will carry it forward, to their daughters as our mothers carried it to us.

I shared my story this weekend, my story of pain and loss, my story of the darkness of dementia, the fear my sister and I share with each other and with our daughters. I shared my story with writers who live their own version of this life, this loss and in the sharing of it lived once again with guilt and shame. Neither directed at my mother, both directed at me. At me and my relief of this weekend, this weekend 'off', this weekend away from my mother's house, her photo albums and her words, the limited vocabulary that is hers now. The vocabulary that shrinks each day, word by word, letter by letter.

From the windows that open on Deer Isle, the windows that open to the sea and salt air, the view is breathtaking. From the window that opens into me, opens to the guilt and shame, the view isn't so great.