Every Mother Is a Daughter The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, And a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes And Knitting Patterns Included)

Chapter One Past, Present, Future Perri: This book is about mothers, but I would like to begin with my father. Since his death, sudden and unexpected, in 2001, I have been carrying on a variety of conversations with him. Some of these take place in my car when I am driving. Ever since his death, I have found myself talking to him, often out loud, while I drive, sometimes filling him in on how my life is going or chewing over a dilemma or up- dating him on the world. For the first year after he died, those conversationswell, I suppose you might call them monologues, but I find it more comfortable and comforting to think of them as conversations, to imagine him there, in some sense, listening inusually ended with me in tears in my car, trying to drive carefully, facing yet once again the hard, cold fact that I would never again hear my father's voice. But not all conversationsor even all monologuestake place in the spoken voice. I am a writer, and writing is what I do with my emotions, my stories, my insights, such as they are. I started writing essays about my fatheran essay for a knitting magazine about knitting sweaters for my father, an essay for a newspaper travel section about travel memories of my father. I found I had many such essays in meI still have notes for a piece about my father and food, for example, and another about my father and P. G. Wodehouse. And I think of the process of writing these various essays and articles as somewhere between tribute and conversation; the person I am really telling these stories to, I think, is the person who isn't here to read them. By writing about him, I know, I am trying to conjure him and keep him with me. Losing a parent is a life lesson you can't learn from anyone else's experience, or even from the collective human experience of all the millions of human beings who have lost their parents before you. That my father should be goneso suddenly, when no one was in any way readythat his voice with all its stories and opinions should be still. That I should go on now to live my life as a fatherless daughter. And in my bleakest moments, I had to acknowledge and accept that someday I would be not only fatherless but also motherless; the lesson I had learned was that parents die and leave you. Remember that comforting false assurance we all offer our children when they're young and they first find out about deathDon't worry, darling; I won't die for a long, long time, not till you're all grown up? Well, the part we don't tell them is that no matter how many decades you've accumulated when the time comes, you don't necessarily feel all grown up, or even moderately ready to carry on alone. What I am trying to say, and I feel some trepidation in saying it, as if it might bring bad luck, was that for the first time, I began to have flashes of life without my mother as well as my father. I began to imagine myself writing similar essays about my motherI could easily imagine the topics. My mother and writing, my mother and food, my mother and her iconic ethnic jokes. And I found myself rebelling against the whole idea of writing about my mother. My mother is a writer, and she is still very much alive and writing. What I wanted was not a collection, someday, of articles in my own signature voice celebrating her, eulogizing her, trying my best to capture her essencewhat I wanted was the real thing. My father was gone, but my mother was available, and it was suddenly clear to me that I should take full advantage of that availability, that we should try together to come at the various interesting motherdaughter life issues, in our two different and distinct voiceKlass, Sheila Solomon is the author of 'Every Mother Is a Daughter The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, And a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes And Knitting Patterns Included)', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345477187 and ISBN 0345477189.