Today I’m standing here washing my ‘almost inherited’ or should I say ‘uninherited’ punch bowl, ladle, stand, and 27 punch cups while remembering the story about these fine pieces my mother purchased in the mid-50s. I’m being very careful not to break or chip any part of it. Hard to believe it’s still perfectly intact as it sat atop our dining room table after all those years (and kids, periodically being moved to the bedroom for family gathers and in later years the bedroom was to become it’s permanent setting.
This punch bowl has a story… My mother loved this punch bowl. She loved fine things and had a good eye for them. During those early years of her married life she also had purchased a fine set of china and a nice edition of real silverware. Funny but, I don’t recall ever using the punch bowl nor the china and certainly not the silverware. My mother kept a strict understanding that these things were to be taken care of and only used for special occasions.
One day in maybe the 80s or so, Mother asked me and my two sisters to write down which of these three items we wanted when she passed away. I immediately wrote down the punch bowl and my two sisters wrote what they wanted. Hallelujah! Everyone got the item they wanted! Mother wrote down (in the big white family Bible which sat on our living room table for many years)who got what and that was that, as it were etched in stone.
When our spry Mother passed away in 2020 at the age of 93, after complications from a sudden fall, we three sisters came together to share our grief, bury our mother, and split the family belongings. My mother had everything in order AND probably had kept everything she ever owned, that’s a polite way of saying she was a hoarder. In fact she owned up to this accusation and often referred to herself as a “clean and organized hoarder.” As we three girls were attempting to sort through almost a hundred years of stuff, I heard my sisters whispering with each other like two cackling hens over the same grain of corn. Because I was the so called black sheep of our family (whatever that means, explain later), I resentfully said, “I can hear y’all.” It was then that I was told Mother had changed her mind and Karen (my younger sister) was to get the punch bowl as well as the silverware. Mother had also changed it in our beautiful white family Bible. As far as I was concerned, this was as she had carved it in Jello. Blasphemy!! And of course I replied, “Like hell, I’m taking the punch bowl.” And I did, simple as that. Hence, meaning of black sheep: always speaking one’s mind. Mother didn’t like that…
I loved my mother and I know she loved me. She just didn’t like me. I realized this after many years of pondering (and terribly hurt feelings) why she had often shown blatant favoritism against me, the “middle child, the black sheep, the difficult one.” My daddy would sometimes apologize for this saying he didn’t know why “she was like this or did the things she did.” And that’s okay. Even if it’s been written in the holy book of things I’ll never hear the end of. Because I have learned finally, after all these years, that it’s okay for people (even your mother) to not like you. That’s their problem. (If she hadn’t loved me, I would have had a much harder time with that.)
