| Every year on my birthday, from the time
I turned 12, one white gardenia was delivered anonymously to me at my house. There was
never a card or note, and calls to the florist were in vain, because the purchase was
always made in cash. After a while, I stopped trying to discover the identity of the
sender. I just delighted in the beauty and heady perfume of that one magical, perfect
white flower nestled in folds of soft pink tissue paper. But I never stopped imagining who
the sender might be. Some of my happiest moments were spent in day dreams about someone
wonderful and exciting, but too shy or eccentric to make known his or her identity. In my
teen years, it was fun to speculate that the sender might be a boy I had a crush on, or
even someone I didn't know who had noticed me.
My mother often contributed to my speculations. She'd
ask me if there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness, who might be showing
appreciation anonymously. She reminded me of the times when I'd been riding my bike and
our neighbor drove up with her car full of groceries and children. I always helped her
unload the car and made sure the children didn't run into the road. Or maybe the mystery
sender was the old man across the street. I often retrieved his mail during the winter, so
he wouldn't have to venture down his icy steps.
My mother did her best to foster my imagination about
the gardenia. She wanted her children to be creative. She also wanted us to feel cherished
and loved, not just by her, but by the world at large.
When I was 17, a boy broke my heart. The night he
called for the last time, I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, there was
a message scribbled on my mirror in red lipstick: "Heartily know, when half-gods go,
the gods arrive." I thought about that quotation from Emerson for a long time, and I
left it where my mother had written it until my heart healed. When I finally went for the
glass cleaner, my mother knew that everything was all right again.
But there were some hurts my mother couldn't heal. A
month before my high school graduation, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My
feelings ranged from simple grief to abandonment, fear, distrust and overwhelming anger
that my dad was missing some of the most important events in my life.
I became completely uninterested in my upcoming
graduation, the senior-class play and the prom - events that I had worked on and looked
forward to. I even considered staying home to attend college instead of going away as I
had planned because it felt safer.
My mother, in the midst of her own grief, wouldn't hear
of me missing out on any of these things. The day before my father died, she and I had
gone shopping for a prom dress and had found a spectacular one -- yards and yards of
dotted Swiss in red, white and blue. Wearing it made me feel like Scarlett O'Hara. But it
was the wrong size, and when my father died the next day, I forgot all about the dress.
My mother didn't. The day before the prom, I found the
dress waiting for me -- in the right size. It was draped majestically over the living room
sofa, presented to me artistically and lovingly. I may not have cared about having a new
dress, but my mother did.
She cared how we children felt about ourselves. She
imbued us with a sense of the magic in the world, and she gave us the ability to see
beauty even in the face of adversity.
In truth, my mother wanted her children to see
themselves much like the gardenia -- lovely, strong, perfect, with an aura of magic and
perhaps a bit of mystery.
My mother died when I was 22, only 10 days after I was
married.
That was the year the gardenias stopped coming.
~By Marsha Arons~
from "Chicken Soup For A Woman's Soul"
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