This is the cup from which I drink my three o’clock tea. Obviously, I usually have that sometime around two, because I have to collect children from school. But you know the cup of tea I mean.
Generally, the tea I have at three is green. If I’m having peppermint, I use a different cup. I never drink coffee from it. In summer, I sometimes use it to drink chilled water from. Which is interesting, because of all the cups I use, this is one of the easiest to warm. I need only the smallest amount of water in the bottom to be swirled as it is tipped into the sink, and it is warm.
My mother gave me this cup when I was around 17 because some days just are she said. Here is the point where I would tell you that this cup symbolises, therefore, some moment of connectedness between the two of us and that when I drink from it I think of her and the way she always understood me and always knew how to say the right thing.
In truth, I have never known what she meant as she pulled the cup from the supermarket bag and gave it to me. Somewhat awkwardly, it must be said.
I don’t even know whether she was referring to my life or to her own.
And it’s only just now, as I’ve been writing this post that it has even occurred to me that she might have been talking about herself and not about me. Ha! And they say blogging is narcissistic.
We were neither of us Dog Persons so it can’t be that.
I had to leave for the school pick up before I could quite finish this post, and as I was walking in and pondering this cup, I started to wonder: do you think that if your mother dies when you are young(ish) you become more like her than you might otherwise have done?
This was just gonna be a blog entry about a cup of tea. Honestly.
A thought to ponder even if you’ve lost your mother when you are old(ish).
Or when you’ve lost your father and therefore spend a great deal of time with your mother…
There’s a lot to think about, isn’t there?
I do think mothers and crockery go together. The other day I was pondering one of the bowls in the Spode dinner set cherished for many years by my mother and inherited by me after she died. There is a place along the rim where a chip about as big as a thumbnail, probably bashed on a tap while some careless daughter was washing the dishes, has been glued back into place, presumably with Araldite or Superglue. Infinite pains have been taken. She probably manoeuvred it into place with eyebrow tweezers. So far it has outlived her by eight and a half years.
I am so not like that.
I do think mothers and crockery go together. The other day I was pondering one of the bowls in the Spode dinner set cherished for many years by my mother and inherited by me after she died. There is a place along the rim where a chip about as big as a thumbnail, probably bashed on a tap while some careless daughter was washing the dishes, has been glued back into place, presumably with Araldite or Superglue. Infinite pains have been taken. She probably manoeuvred it into place with eyebrow tweezers. So far it has outlived her by eight and a half years.
I am so not like that.
I hope the answer to that question is no!
In fact, I’d guess at the opposite.
I rather unsentimentally don’t want to be like my mother, much as I loved her.
It’s funny how our blogs morph as we write them. It just means you are writing from the heart.
Thanks for sharing the thought. I think many times when our parents share with us, they are talking about themselves.