Usually whenever I am traveling and leaving my parents’ place my mom makes sure I take a jar of jam with me. I believe to most people this would be weird – a jar of jam, or two – but to me it is always so much more. To just get a little idea about this jam-thing is to understand her way of saying that she loves me. I see my mom picking all the berries from the bushes or trees when it is time to harvest – then proudly going to the kitchen and cooking the best jam ever is amazing. The way she washes the berries first, weighing and measuring all the ingredients will always be familiar; as the smell that flows through the house when the jam cooks is. And of course we always tried the jam with a slice of bread when it was still too hot to eat. 🙂
Then she gives me the nicest jar to take on my flight to wherever. How it is always important for her to make sure my family and I have always fresh sheets, towels, simply fresh everything when we come to stay. With me currently living here of course nothing has changed. Sometimes the feeling is just me reverting back to being 12-years-old when I am here. Of course I am grown up and the situation with me living at my parents place for so long now is definitely not normal but we arranged for the time being let’s say. I know I am their grown daughter and a wife and adult with a child and that this living situation will not be forever. But just the thought that they offered to help me and make me more comfortable I will never ever forget. And I have been telling them that I am very grateful for what they did for me and petit Joel so far; also for my husband when he visited.
It is also nice to see that every time my younger brother is here my dad makes sure his car is all checked before he leaves again. Tapes and fixes it, and fills some oil in here and there. All sparkle and shine. It is the cutting out of any “Sudoku” from the newspaper for him because he loves to solve them. And the coffee that my mom always makes fresh whenever he wakes up.
Also when my younger sister comes home to visit they take care of her as well. And if it is just by taking her two kids for a couple of hours so she can relax and have a drink outside on the terrace with me at night. 🙂 Also how they let all of us know whenever they see, hear, or read anything that could be of interest to us; call with traffic updates or when they always say “call when you get home and be careful driving”.
These are my parents. They show us that they love us verbally but also through actions. I have never realized this too much when I grew up because it seemed just “normal” but now since I moved away, came back, all grown up as a mother I can see and understand all this even better. I have been thinking today that becoming a parents after I have been parented all my life is pretty weird. When I grew up I had all these guidelines, models of what to do and what not to do or even more how to figure out how to solve something and what being a good parents looks like. All this knowledge I gained I have to apply to myself and my son now if I wish to do so. Maybe just some of it – whatever I like best.
I have been thinking about the parent I want to be and the parent I currently am. I thought of my son and how he is growing up – and how he at some point might look back at me as his mom and at the way I love him and did things for him. And most importantly I want for him to look back at his childhood and just feel happiness. Just remembering the smell of this glass of jam. All of these little things in our daily life like I have his banana in the morning sliced up, his apple juice mixed with water ready when he is having breakfast. All these routines that make him happy. Read to him every night and make sure he has his teddy when he curl up in bed – big love, little actions. 😀
A glass of jam, this all so familiar smell in the kitchen when my mom cooks it – I am looking forward to all these things I can show my son and this will roll into the larger story of this unconditional love I have for him.
