There’s a six word memoir challenge circling the Internet.
It was started by Smith Magazine, and it’s making its way around the globe like a little fire jumping from place to place.
Hemingway summarized his own life in the following six words:
For Sale: Baby Shoes, never worn.
These are the rules:
1. Write your own six word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
3. Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag five more blogs with links.
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!
Six Words. Not so easy, and yet it is.
Everything can be boiled down to its essence. I’ve learned to see the beauty in boundaries. There’s such freedom within fences and walls.It hones us. We have to make choices.
I began to think of my book, Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir in terms of six words.
I’ve mulled them over in my mouth the way I used to pop as few marbles when I was a child. I liked their glassy feel and unrelenting curves.
What can I say in only six words that could sum up a lifetime of our mother-daughter relationship?
How can I not focus on one aspect over another?
Mothering Mother is certainly a caregiving book, a book about Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but deeper, it’s a family book–a book about a mother and a daughter, and that daughter and her daughters. It is in their coming together and in my mother’s forgetting is when I begin to remember who I am. Who I must become. My mother’s mother. I must hold her life, her memories, our love.
I’ve received dozens of reviews, some by people I know and most by people I’ve never met. They write what the book means to them, what happens, and what they think of it. What they don’t realize is that they ‘re telling me an awful lot about themselves.
I notice what someone focuses on and why it’s important to them. I can often tell if they’re married, single, still in their 20s, or well in their 70s by what concerns them. Some focus on the madness of Alzheimer’s, others zero in on the sandwich generation aspect, while others are shaken by the dying and death account and never seem to be able to move onto the time after death; the rebuilding of a person’s life.
We reveal our truths every day in the smallest of gestures.
So here goes–Motheirng Mother in Six Words:
I have become mother and daughter.
So here are my tags:
Shannon: www.mymentorcenter.com
Cheryl: http://www.cherylktardif.blogspot.com
Linda: www.gooddaysnodays.blogspot.com
Karen: www.karenharringtonbooks.com
Mary Emma: www.alzheimersnotes.com
My blog connection was: Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? – http://trishsdiary.wordpress.com
It’s easier to sum up a portion of your life because life has its seasons.
Caregiving has a season. Death, grieving, rebirth, each its own season.
Even Alzheimer’s, as cruel as it is, is only for a season (although it can be really long one).
My mother was here for a season. Now, she’s gone. She lived 92 years. She remembers her family discussing the sinking of the Titanic when she was a child. Her mother had small pox and worked as a telephone operator in the days of party lines. My mother was a teen during World War I and rode in model T Fords in the back of a rumble seat. She married in October of 29, the day they announced the Depression. She wrote letters to Daddy every night of World War II as she sat in a darkened closet and penned by flashlight during the brown outs. She became a minister, radio evangelist, singer, adopted me, her daughter, was married for 52 years, and then had a few years to spare–took trips with friends, settled into scrapbooking, and lived to see her three granddaughters.
Six words for a lifetime? Now, that’s a task.
She lived an amazing full life.
I hope you’ll join in the fun and try your hand at a six word memoir!
Remember to post me as your contact point. Tag–you’re it!
~Carol D. O’Dell
Author of Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
What a lovely post, I can see why you wrote the book. Thanks so much for playing:)
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I’m glad you decided to do this. The six word memoir that you came up with for your mom is beautiful, and the one for yourself seems very apropos.
[...] author of Mothering Mother and More, tagged my Alzheimer’s Notes blog for this meme, Is Your Life a Six Word Memoir? So I thought I’d share this with my readers [...]