Ileen Barlow
There's a scripture in the old testament that is written to parents and tells us to remember all we've seen and heard and teach it to our children and our children's children. I wondered why parents were admonished to remember; what use is that to our children when their lives are so different from ours, then I thought about what I learned from my mother, my grandmother, and I realize that our experiences are not wasted.
"...Our time on earth is an irreplaceable gift, one to be treasured and relished every moment; life is a fragile gift that is delivered to us in pieces, and it only achieves meaning as we cherish and blend the pieces—even the seemingly insignificant pieces—into a full, universal whole."
I have a carved wooden box, handed down to me from my grandmother. I suppose it was intended as a handkerchief box, but this box was where I keep small mementoes. One day I was going through that box and noticed a rather small, sealed envelope. On the front was written, "To the family of Elwood and Ileen Barlow to be opened in the year 2000." I stared at that writing for a few minutes and thought, "that sure does look like my writing, but I don't remember what it is." Since the instructions were to open it in 2000, and it was then 2001, I decided to open the rather thick envelope and found a letter written by me to my children along several photographs. Photos included one of the family with seven children, plus one of the new baby born that year, making eight children, a picture of my husband and our two & three yr old boys in cow boy hats, and a picture of our old farm home. As I looked at the date of the letter, it was 1980, twenty one years before that day I found it in my handkerchief box.
As I opened the letter, my mind went back in time to a conference I remember attending where the speaker told us of the importance of writing our feelings to our children. I was 36 years old and a busy young mother. These are the lines I read: "it seems funny to be writing to you, my children, in twenty years.
The significance of this letter is not just that I followed through with the assignment to write a letter, but that it survived the fire of our home in 1993. A little smoky, but otherwise intact and preserved in that little wooden box. The eight children in the old photo were joined by two more sons, making a total of 10 children. Our oldest daughter, Rochelle, a talented piano and organ player, died at the age of 17 after a sudden onset of Meningitis. During those years I had had thyroid cancer; my husband was diagnosed with cancer and had died after a ten-year battle with Lymphoma. I had gone to work after not working outside the home for 25 years; I had undergone breast cancer with its treatment and surgery. Also during those next twenty years, we had three weddings, six of kids graduate from college and the last two were just entering college.
Wouldn't it be nice to receive a letter from your mother to maybe help you through the dark times of life, or to give you a laugh just when you need it most; or to tell of her experiences of becoming a wife or mother? What young mother wouldn't like a letter written to her from her mother about what it felt like to feel hic ups in the belly and foot jabs in the ribs as life struggles in the womb; the relief to hear a baby's first cry; how it felt to leave a child at the kindergarten door and try to hide the tears until you were safely out of sight; what it was like to struggle through school and career options; how health issues affected your life and relationships; or how it feels to face a future living alone after children are grown or after a spouse dies.
Life has a way of giving us all kinds of challenges, but we have to ultimately choose how we will respond to those challenges and what we want our children to remember from what we, ourselves, have experienced in life. What we are, is our legacy to our children. The best legacy a mom can leave her children is to know that they are loved. Surviving life's challenges is more than exercising willpower, it's choosing to accept help from God and those who are His helping hands to lighten our loads. I've been blessed abundantly with both kinds of assistance.
(Ileen Barlow- National Mother of the Year 2008)