Last week, I opened a box my dad had given me after my mom died. It had been sitting underneath some chairs in our basement, and I only came across it because I was selling the chairs. Inside were some of my first drawings, cards I had made for my mom when I was little, paperwork from my childhood surgeries, and birthday cards from my very first birthday.
My mom had kept it all, and I love that.
There is so much about my childhood that I can’t ask my mom about anymore. I can’t ask her what I was like, what she remembers, or why she kept certain things, but I can look at what she kept. It feels like a tiny glimpse into my mom as a mom during the years I don’t remember.
If she kept those things, they meant something. Maybe she thought I’d want them one day. Maybe they were important to her. Maybe both. Either way, they’re important to me now.
The timing feels weird. I didn’t consciously open that box with the relevance of it to my life as a mom to Charlee right now. But around the same time I found the box, Charlee did her first painting at daycare, and I had just stored away all her birthday cards from her first birthday in her keepsake box.
I feel like I understand my mom more now, and I am reminded that I am just like her. We keep the little things. The first drawings, the birthday cards, the handmade cards.
A little over 4.5 years without my mom, I got this unexpected glimpse of her as the young mom she was when I was little, and it’s a gift.
I think that sometimes I’ll probably do something with Charlee and realize that my mom probably did it with me. I wish I could ask her about these years, but I’m grateful she kept these pieces of me, because it feels a bit like pieces of her.
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