As soon as I graduated high school, my mother wanted grandbabies. She was a labor and delivery nurse for many years and just loved anything baby! There was always an Anne Geddes calendar on the wall, figurines and nick-knacks, as well as her “grandbaby hope chest”. She had saved all of the hand smocked dresses she made for my sister and I, all the knitted sweaters and booties, and even a few special baby toys she had saved for that special day when she would finally have a grand child.
My mother would even make new knitted clothes for her unborn grandchildren. It was as if she knew that she would never live to see them.
In January of 2001, my mother passed away from non-Hodgkin Lymphoma at the young age of 47. She had fought bravely for 11 years, enduring chemotherapy, radiation, and even a bone marrow transplant. The medications and high doses of steroids left her with limited use of her hands, difficulty breathing, cataracts, diabetes, and too many other symptoms to name. It was as if all of this trial and pain she suffered honed her down into this radiant fighting spirit that inspired so many other terminally ill people.
You see, she was not afraid. My mother would proudly walk around the grocery store with her head bald from the chemotherapy. When she wanted to go out to a restaurant, she dressed up, but never covered her head. She never minded the curious looks from the children or their questions. Even the elderly people she passed would cringe away from her – as if they could catch her disease by touching her. People who should know better. But she never minded.
You see, she wanted those grandbabies so much that she fought to the end to see them. When the doctors told her that she would never regain full use of her hands, she knitted. Booties, hats, and little onesies and rompers poured from her fingers. And even though she could no longer quilt, she squirreled away baby fabrics for that “someday”.
That someday finally came in June of 2001, 5 months after she died. I remember sitting on the couch and crying so hard my eyes hurt because I could not tell her that her someday had finally come. Her first grandchild was going to be born sometime in February of 2002. But she was already gone and I never got to tell her.
I will never know if had I gotten pregnant sooner, had I given her that someday a little sooner, would she have been able to find the strength to be there when her grandson was born. It is a burden I will always carry.
So I comfort myself in the little things she left behind. The booties, the onesies, the rompers. Those little smocked dresses. And her sewing machine. For you see I have all of her fabric and her prized sewing machine. On it I make all of my quilts; the ones I sell and the ones I keep. All of the quilts I have made for her grandbabies, I have made on that sewing machine. All of the quilts I have made for the babies of friends, I have made on that sewing machine. All of the quilts I make for the children who love my Baby’s Breath Quilts, I have made on that sewing machine.
It is one connection to my mother and my children’s grandmother that still exists. Through this machine and the skills she taught me, I believe that I am able to sew some of that love my mother had for her unborn grandbabies into each quilt. I can show my children each time they wrap up in a quilt that their grandmother loved them so very much. These quilts are a way they can still feel their grandmother’s love.
