The Country Mice

Yesterday would have been my mother’s 79th birthday. You have no idea how hard it is for me to imagine her at this age.

My mother hated hated HATED the idea of getting old. She was crazily, hilariously, obsessively obsessed with concealing her age, to the delight of anyone wanting to torment her by determining The Year In Which She Was Born.

Growing up, my family had an intricately carved child-size wooden rocking chair in our living room, one which had been passed on to me from my great grandmother. One year my grandmother gave us a little gold plate to attach to the rocking chair and on the plate were the dates of birth of the three generations to which the chair had belonged — my grandmother, my mother and me. The plate was duly attached to the little chair, where it stayed for years. One day our family priest, a great friend, dropped by. He and my mother incessantly argued, debated, hissed and howled about the state of the church, the state of women (’twas the early 1970s), the state of all holy men and women of the centuries. They always parted friends, but sometimes it was best to leave the room.

One day he looked at the chair. He smiled. It was a check-mate kind of smile.

“Lyla,” said the priest with the groovy sideburns and green 1967 Mustang. “I know just how old you are.”

The next day the little gold plate was gone.

My mother was also an accomplished artist. Growing up in a multi-media house filled with paper, paints, canvas, clay and visiting contemporaries, I kind of took all those things for granted, but to reflect, it was a rich and inimitable childhood.

My mother herself grew up in a small rural community spattered with immigrants of eastern Europe, struggling to re-invent the agricultural wheel as they worked to tame the stoney and late-to-thaw-early-to-freeze earth. But those immigrants kept hold of the dearest traditions of their old countries and as a result there are churches in the area that could have been plucked from the hills of the Ukraine and Poland, filled with food, language, music,  paintings and vibrant community events.

Do you know these matryoshka dolls? They’re also called babushka dolls. My Baba, my Ukrainian grandmother, called the head scarf she wore every day a babushka, although the word is also used as a diminutive in Russian for grandmother, meaning “little mother.”

The babushka or little mother dolls are based on the idea that the outer or largest dolls holds her babies inside like an expectant mother and that each daughter in turns becomes a mother. They are symbols of fertility and motherhood and have a modified egg shape.

Like the long-disappeared little gold plate, these dolls mark the passing of generations, the great passing of life and talents on to the next layer of family. I gave one set to each of my babes many years ago and we pull them out at Christmas time just because.

There’s fun in taking them apart, trying to remember just how tiny the final one will be, marvelling at the blotches of paint which surprisingly form a recognizable face.

Despite the decades, grey hair and wrinkles it would have cost her to get there, my mother would have loved being a babushka, a little grandmother. Because she died young she’ll always stay young, but like our priest, I smile at how inevitably she’d have had to concede to the passage of time, to paint, to share, to nestle with her egg-lets.