Forgiveness, Love Erase Family Pain

This story has its origins back in the 1960s, when everything seemed jumbled up and raucous around our house. Its ending came three nights ago on Christmas Eve when my mother unwrapped her last present, from my sister in Tucson, and couldn’t believe what was inside.

Here’s the setup, as my sister, now 47, described it over the phone:

“I was about 15,” she said. “I had gone into the cedar chest and found a tablecloth, looked at the pattern and, being the beginning hippie that I was, thought it would make a wonderful poncho. So I cut a hole in the middle of it and decided I was going to wear it.”

No guilt? I asked. “In those days,” she said, “I had no awareness of anything outside myself, whatsoever. It was just sitting in the cedar chest, so I didn’t know why it should be any big deal.”

The big deal was that it had been crocheted by my mother’s mother and given to her after she and Dad married. At the time my sister converted it to a poncho, it already had 20 years of sentimental value.

When Mom saw what my sister had wrought, the two had it out--the latest in a relationship that was going south quickly.

One summer night when she was 16, my sister ran away from home--out her bedroom window and into a new life. Although she never returned to live in my parents’ house, they soon made peace. I’ve often thought one of the greatest things my parents ever did was forgive her afterward, as they and she set about the business of family healing.

The relationship mended, but on my sister’s periodic visits over the years, she and Mom would sometimes reminisce about the tablecloth. When our father died in 1993, my sister said, “Mom started going through things in the cedar chest. She was giving me some of his pictures and we got to the tablecloth and she said, ‘Why don’t you just take this? Maybe you can put a plant in the middle of it and put it on your table.’ ”

My sister put it in her own cedar chest. Then in her early 40s, the cloth was a reminder of her sometimes careless youth, but no longer a painful one.

There it sat for five years, she said, until a couple months ago when she showed the cloth to a friend. She told him how, over the years, everyone had told her she couldn’t repair the cut-out center of a crocheted tablecloth. He wasn’t so sure, and steered her to an award-winning crocheter who thought it might be possible.

The finished product, an intact, crocheted tablecloth that looks as good as new, was my sister’s present this year to her mother.

Because I knew it was coming, it was hard for me to keep from getting emotional as Mom prepared to unwrap it in my living room. I wondered if she would cry. Instead, she laughed joyously and said, “I can’t believe it!”

Great present, I told my sister on the phone. “Even though the issue was ancient history between Mom and me,” she said, “it’s like the completion of something. For me, it’s some sort of cleansing. I thought Mom might cry, but if she laughed, it shows how healed it really is between us.”

Hard to escape the “mending” metaphor, I said. True, my sister said. “It had been gnawing at me over the years. Every time I opened the cedar chest, it was a reminder of one of those dumb things you do as a kid. There’s a lot of hurt in those teenage years, between mother and daughter. This is the hole that is patched. Sounds kind of goofy, huh?”

Mom now has her tablecloth back. She told my sister she’ll probably get it back again someday, passed down from mother to daughter. Then, Mom said, she could pass it down to her daughter.

So, here I am on the sidelines, watching this mother-daughter thing play out, thinking about families. We lament the thoughtless and cruel things we do to each other, sometimes forgetting that forgiveness and kindness can erase them.

Sitting there watching Mom open a present from my sister, I saw it with my very own eyes.

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com