A Mother's Tribute

I finished my Mother Shrine and I like it a lot and feel good about it. In looking at it now I think I glued the butterfly up side down...don’t suppose any one will notice. I just came to realize it has been a healing process for me. I have always had such negative feelings about my mama for many different reasons. She was addicted to prescription meds, an alcoholic, cheated on her spouses and much more I am sure...but when I was looking for old family photos to use I came across this picture of her, my step father  and us 4 siblings I was able to see her in a whole new way...she is so young and so happy in the photo. I do not ever remember seeing her smile in such a way..it made me start thinking about how young she was.. what...15 or 16 when my sister Dolores was born, me a short year later and within the next 3 or so years she had a son, then a second one that she was forced, against her will, to give up for adoption. So here she was, a young divorced mother with 3 kids, no husband and it was just after the great depression. Our grandparents were victims of the dust bowl era and had migrated to Arizona and then to Oregon where we lived when my brothers were born..there she met my step father, a young Texan who had joined the army for lack of work and they married when we three kids were very young. She must have had such wonderful dreams of what her life was going to finally be like with this handsome man who was willing to take on 3 children and raise them as his own. Then some where along the way it all started falling apart for her...that is what I mostly remember. So as I was going to start adding things like pill bottles, booze bottles etc. to this mother shrine I realized what a tumultuous life she must have had and who was I to judge. I decided she deserved better. So my shrine is to honor a girl who was never quite able to over come the doubts and demons who plagued her till her death. To honor a woman and the love of her life and the 6 babies she birthed and the 2 she adopted. Seven she raised and one she never knew but must have loved just as much. I think the loss of that baby haunted her through out her entire life. In retrospect I now realize she was an amazing woman to have managed as well as she did.