Miss Match

I remember this dress of my Mothers. I remember seeing it hanging in her closet as a little girl. She made it from a stiff fabric of turquoise and lime green. It was almost a damask-type of material, heavy and thick. The dress was trimmed in soft, aqua velvet ribbons. The fabric was almost shiny or sparkly but not quite. The ribbons were dull and smooth. I still have those beads she's wearing. They were (are) a sort of light aqua blue too. They were the opposite of the dress, very unrefined, uneven, unsparkly and unsophisticated. I was never sure why she chose them to go with this dress except that they were the perfect color. Nothing else about the pair felt right though. Like many things in her life, they were opposites in every way, but she put them together anyway. Her most prevalent and glaring pairings always included one part extreme sophistication, the other part exquisite cottage art. Her way of illustrating how she felt in her world, I suppose. She would have been happy a medieval earth-mother living in the forests with the druids, but life demanded that she be a member of the working middle class and the wife of a notable member of the community. A sophisticated and rough-hewn piece of the same puzzle.

It's funny. I remember the dress. I remember the jewelry. I have no recollection of the person wearing them. My Mother - happy. Looking at this picture of my Mother makes me feel the same way that I do when I think of this dress and those beads together. They just don't match.
I only remember my Mom as a worried and simultaneously absent participant in our lives. She worried endlessly - about everything. Her fear grew as I grew older. At first it was just concern, then it nervousness, then it became depressed worry and a few years ago it blossomed into full fledged paranoia. Finally it left her essentially unable to concentrate on any matronly task long enough to complete it or care that it remained undone regardless of whom might be affected by it's incompleteness. Big tasks, like 'dinner' or 'being at home' were most days just ignored because they presented too much to worry about. It was so much easier to just go shopping and forget about the hard choices in lieu of the much easier ones.

I don't remember her as chatty or friendly or gregarious - but I do remember her attempts to be. Again, constructing misplaced aliegances to take the place of relationships with actual family members. They were so much easier to navigate when the participants didn't demand her attention every minute of the day as children and spouses tend to do.