Before my Mom was a mother

She had her own dreams

A cup and saucer like this, with the gilt edge rims, was often part of a set of “good china” handed down from generation to generation.

Mom bought it at a flea market, sometime long after I’d left home and she’d taken up the Saturday flea habit from my sister.

Its delicate femininity reminds me that behind her steely will, waitress uniforms, and other trappings of blue collar life, was Lorraine, the woman who liked to dress up (even for Bingo, which we attended with my aunt every Wednesday); who wore crazy feathered fascinator hats as a young woman and warmed her shoulders at Mass with a fox stole replete with the head and beady eyes; who as a school girl dreamed of being an actress.

Even 50 years later, her eyes would get a little misty recalling the teacher who’d given her a black velveteen dress to wear in a school play, something well out of her reach financially.

I imagine, though I have nothing to confirm my supposition, that its beauty was the reason she bought this orphaned couple. She never used it, and I think that was the point. Unlike so many things she bought over the decades of child-rearing, it wasn’t utilitarian.

I don’t use it either. Except to remind me of the Mom who was also a woman with dreams, many of which didn’t come true. Like me.