My mother is an amazing woman. A strong woman. A kind woman. The kind of woman who makes a difference. She's a hell of a therapist and a giving woman. She comes from a time when women gave more to others than to themselves. I've learned a great deal from her strength and compassion.
When we were little my mom and dad would take us shopping right before Christmas, and then we would spend hours going with them to several houses to deliver the gifts to families all over town. This went on for years, some families we kept going back to throughout the years and one in particular for at least ten.
I remember when the ERA bill came to town, kind of like a carnival. My mother marched for women's rights, wore her yellow armband downtown in Salt Lake City, where the LDS church sent their women out to defeat the bill that seemed to threaten women's ability to be "stay at home mom's." Women today stand on the backs of women who years ago stood up for rights of women in this country.
There were several people who we "took in" over the years, children and teenagers that suddenly came to stay for awhile until they no longer needed us. Years of raising me and my sister and taking care of so many things that moms do.
My mother ran a sweat lodge in her back yard, in the Ute Tradition, right next to the Mormon Ward.
When I was 19, we got a phone call from an old neighbor. We didn't live in the same neighborhood anymore and obviously I no longer rode the bus to school. But the phone call came from a family who still had elementary age children. They wanted to move the bus stop but the school district told them they had to call my mother for permission. You see, years ago when our street was just a dirt road the bus didn't stop at our street, which required several of us, ages six to twelve, to walk down a busy two lane street with no sidewalk, in six foot high snow drifts in winter and over-hanging trees the rest of the time. It was dangerous, but the school refused to change the bus stop saying, that was the way it was and always would be. So my mom marched us down to the end of the lane for a week and stood in the middle of the road until the bus stopped for all us girls who lived there. They finally moved that bus stop. This same public school also required girls to wear skirts to school at all times, which came to a halt one nasty winter when my mother and a few brave others sent their girls crying to school in pants.
These are snippets from my childhood, memories that reside quietly in my behavior patterns and influence or dictate my soul from the past and of course they are really the smallest of things, the big things I save for myself.
All this to say my mom made a difference in my life in many little ways and has been there for countless others along the road.
This year after some difficult times my mom asked me to make her a Meditation Necklace. It needed to be fifty prayer beads that she could use like a rosary (we were never Catholic,) praying on each bead six times to equal three-hundred prayers. I thought about how to make something like this for her and it showed up one night in my mind.
The necklace has all seven chakras represented with seven simple gemstone beads for each chakra, totaling 49 beads. Then there are seven more larger intricate gemstone beads at the center of the piece representing each Chakra again.
To use the necklace you start at the root chakra intricate bead and go thru all the chakra beads along the path, praying on each bead. One time around equals 50 prayers. Then you move on to the Sacral Intricate Bead and pray again on each smaller bead through the circle, an so on up through the first 6 Chakras: Root, Sacral, Solar Plexus, Heart, Throat and Brow (this equals 300 prayers) When you get to the final Crown Chakra Intricate bead you have one last prayer for Gratitude.
She tells me she is using it daily.