I cried with the broken crockery until my eyes were puffy and swollen. I had labored all week on it because when I saw it on the shelf, I had loved it immediately. A cowboy boot with western scenes? Sign me up. I painted. I painted. I pined. I poured and I pored and I made sure the work was painstakingly perfect. It was my masterpiece: a thing so me that I couldn't help but love it. And yet, as a child, I knew that I could never keep it for myself. It wasn't mine to keep.
It was so me that I had to give it away to the person I loved most.
Isn't that always the case? The things we love must go to the people we love? Perhaps it's only natural. We humans are a peculiarly selfless lot at times. And yet I felt that my gift was the utmost that a human could give--a pottery boot of unspeakable beauty for another person. I wouldn't part with it for the world, so I gave it freely to my mother.
Still your disbelief. I was eight.
And so, disaster. This pottery I have so carefully built up in my mind is crushed in the journey home. This, despite the careful wrapping my mother had given it. She had smiled wide enough to drown out the sun and sequestered the boot in the trunk of the car. At home, the boot was splinters of its former glory.
I cried with the broken crockery and I'm not afraid to admit it. It was the crowning achievement of a week spent without my mother. It was all I had to show for all my work. It was so much useless hash in a towel.
Of course, that's not the end of the story. Mom glued the boot back together, and although you might suspect otherwise, I hated it. It was broken. Useless. Unworthy. I had made it for her and it had the gall to break. How dare that boot assume I would love it the same? Of all the unworthy wastes of my time, it was the crowning achievement of worthlessness. Once meant as a symbol of myself, it now deserved no admiration. No place of honor. Nothing but shame and sorrow.
Less than a week ago, my mother sent me a picture of the boot that I had painted and loved and she had glued and saved. I didn't know what to think anymore. The boot was such a bittersweet memory for me that I stuffed it away so I wouldn't think about it. But I had made it so much myself that I had to give it to her. Why had she saved it when it was no more than a crappy little crumble in a towel?
I think the boot is no longer my creation, my magnum opus, my work of love. It is hers. It is my mother's. It is her message to me, that if something is so much myself that I must give it to her, she knows where the glue is at.
I love you mom.
This is the last time I cry over that boot.
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