When my daughter took portraits a few weeks ago, I let her wear a strand of pearls.

I didn’t tell her that I allowed it in honor of my Grandma Pearl, who passed away last fall.

I just told her to be careful with them and, if she was, we’d make a tradition out of letting her wear them every portrait day until she turned 18, when she could keep them for herself.

These were pearls that my mother had given me, not the pearls I’d been given to remember my grandmother. Those are mine for life.

This Memorial Day, I can’t help but think of my grandmother and one thing that’s always struck me is that the biggest “complaint” about her is that she was a neat-freak, which is only a problem because the neatness gene wasn’t passed along to her granddaughter.

I’m thinking of my Uncle Henry, too, who, unlike my grandmother, was a hoarder, and I can’t help but smile when I think of many unexpected finds my other relatives have made as they’ve cleaned out his home in Los Angeles.

It all makes me wonder what stories my kids are going to tell about me. Hopefully, I’ll have many years ahead of me to create a legacy so they won’t remember me as the shrill, short-tempered mom, who loves them to excess and isn’t particularly tolerant when they don’t show her the same reverence.

Are they going to remember me as the woman who worked her schedule around school, enrichment and tutoring sessions, only to end up working late into the night when there were books to be read and movies to cuddle up in front of? Will I be the mom who just said, “Wait!”?

Are they going to recall that I worked hard to earn enough to provide for their needs and some extras, besides, or are they just going to remember all the times I said no, or claimed poverty when I couldn’t be indulgent?

My four-year-old likes to “remember.” She often “remembers” the time I never showed up to pick her up from her father’s house. Someday, she’ll realize that I obviously showed up, since she’s been able to blame me for abandoning her again and again and again.

I don’t even want to speculate about what my 11-year-old REALLY thinks about me. He’s at the point where he needs to become a parent himself before he can understand that some of the things I’ve done out of love, not because I wanted to cause him endless misery.

Luckily this Memorial Day isn’t about me, though, so I can turn my thoughts to better people.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Family Tree. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.