The lesson of the mismatched earrings

Today is my mother’s birthday and I miss her dearly. But this post is not about grief. It’s about a lesson she taught me a few months ago, shortly before her death.

Mom had excellent – and expensive – taste in clothes and jewelry, but I’ve never met anyone who lost as much jewelry as she did.

Anyway…. one day when my daughter and I went to pick her up to take her out for lunch, I noticed that her earrings didn’t match each other.  Being a psychologist and knowing that she was over 90 years old, my first thought was “Uh oh… is this cognitive decline?”  So during lunch, I casually asked her, “What’s up with the earrings, Mom?”

“Oh,” Mom said. “I lost the mates to these but I loved both pairs so much that I decided I’d just wear them together. I’m starting a new fashion trend!”

I chuckled over her attitude and confidence.

After Mom’s death, as we went through her belongings to sort things out, I came across those two mismatched earrings that she had worn that day.

They weren’t her most expensive earrings, but they now had sentimental value to me.

And so I took one of those earrings to my jeweler and had him make it into a ring that I wear on my hand.  I look at it and remember the lesson she taught me that day –  that we can grieve what we may have lost or we can enjoy what we have and start our own trend.

If you’re parenting a child with challenges, you  have a choice.  It’s understandable that you may grieve for a while over what you might have had or dreams for the future that seem lost. But if you continue to grieve over what might have been, you may miss out on enjoying the child you have.

Wouldn’t today be a good day to start your own trend?

Carousel image:  Mom in 2003.