The Complexities of Grief

My mother has left this world.  For a better one, to be sure…but even knowing that, it is so very sad and so very strange, surreal even, to believe that she is no longer in this one, where I can see her, touch her, speak to her.  Losing your mother makes you feel untethered. After all, she is your first home.  It just feels wrong to live in a world that doesn’t have her in it.

But my mother’s death has affected me in ways I could not have foreseen.  My father died in 2016, and over the years since then, the grief I felt at his passing has lost its sharp edges.  I can think of him these days with fondness and peace, and only every once in a while do my memories bring tears. Now, however, it’s all come back to me: there's that stabbing pain again; but this time around it has an even greater force, because my mom was my last surviving parent.  I fear the grieving process will be much longer and more complex this time around.

I knew that at 89, Mom didn’t have too many years left. Even so, I didn’t like to dwell on the possibility of losing her.  But the unthinkable has become a harsh reality.  

Grief is a funny, unpredictable thing.  It’s sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.  It strikes at times when it doesn’t seem to make sense, and then stays hidden when it seems it should be brought into the light.

This morning when we got to church for Mass, a few of our fellow daily Mass friends asked how I was doing, and I was able to answer them dry-eyed.  I headed over to our usual pew, worried that I might seem cold to them, too “doing okay” for a person who’s just lost her mom.  But minutes after kneeling to pray and then settling in my seat, my eyes suddenly welled up with tears, brought on by a random memory.  

I cried copious tears during the week and a half that I spent with my mother during her last days on earth—but usually when alone, or with just my husband present.  And I cry often these days when my husband and I say our daily Rosaries aloud together.  (I’m a private griever, perhaps?  Could that be it?)

After the initial trauma of that awful time in the hospital was past and she’d been gone about a week or so, I found that I was crying a good bit less often throughout the day, and I worried that only a very hard heart could “get over” a mother’s death so soon.  Ha!  As if.

Each day, it seems, I am hit out of the blue at odd times with an image or a memory that brings tears to my eyes: when I think of how happy my mom always, always was when my husband and I arrived for a visit, for instance—and the extreme delight she took in our sons (and even more so, in their children, her beloved great-grandchildren)…when I remember the way she reached her hand out, from her hospital bed (on one of the days before she became unresponsive), and grabbed mine, letting me know that she wanted me to lean in for a kiss…when I think of how one night as we were leaving the hospital, I said goodbye but then went back in to give her another kiss and tell her, “I’m glad you’re my mom,” and in her weak, quiet voice, she replied that she was glad, too.  (It would be one of our last conversations, because not too long after that, she could no longer move or talk.)  I tear up when I realize that when we are up in NY for the summer (where we go every year, to escape the VA heat and manage our Oyster Haven VRBO house), I won't be seeing her, bringing dinners for her, going for girls'-day-out lunches or shopping trips with her and my two sisters. Sometimes, all it takes to get me crying is looking at an image of Our Lord or Our Blessed Mother.  It’s a very fragile time for my emotions, even though I’m sure it often appears to the world as if I’m a rock, extremely stoic and handling my mom’s passing with more than the usual amount of equanimity.

I’m trying not to worry about how strange my brand of grief seems to be.  It is what it is, I guess.  One of my dear loyal readers, Madeline, left this comment on my last post: “Be gentle with yourself—there’s no right or wrong way to process a death.”

Those are words that I needed to hear right now, as I navigate through this confusing maze that is the grieving process.  Thank you, my friend.

(Please dear readers, pray for the repose of the soul of my spunky, funny, one-of-kind mother.  She was the bee's knees, she really was.)

Like Leila, Like Laura (Maybe?)

I have been so inspired lately, reading Leila Lawler's "Like Mother, Like Daughter" blog (which is often graced with lovely, well-written posts by her grown daughters as well).  How I missed her all these years that I've been immersed in the blogging world is beyond me.  She is just awesome (as are her girls), and I pretty much agree with her mindset on every aspect of the vitally important triple vocation we share: wife/mother/homemaker.  I mean, I feel like we could be best friends if we ever met (although I'm so shy and terrible at making new friends that she might be less enthusiastic about the whole thing than I.  But I think we could be Internet friends, at least...).

Like "Auntie Leila," I  have striven to live by the "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without" philosophy, which she often espouses on her blog, throughout my marriage. I've tried to be as thrifty and frugal as possible--to make our home as comfy, warm, and beautiful as I could, even during those early years when I had to do it on a shoestring budget. And then by the time I could have spent more, I was hesitant to do so--because the habit of trying to make what I had work for us, and if not, to find something old and used and in need of a bit of TLC to make it "perfect," was deeply ingrained in me after years of creative housekeeping. 

I am quite lucky, I realize, to enjoy the type of hobbies that go hand-in-hand with my three-pronged vocation: cooking, baking, home decorating, furniture refinishing, painting, drawing, sewing, crafting, reading, and writing, to name a few! I even like to clean.  (Should I be embarrassed to admit that?  My husband calls me the "mad vacker," because I love to vacuum way more than I should.) 

Also, Leila Lawler is the only blogger (other than myself!) whom I've ever seen touting the benefits of wearing an apron to do housework; my boys like to tease me about my apron-wearing.  It's true that I am rarely seen without one during waking hours if I'm in my own house.  By I don't sleep in one, as one of my funny sons has accused.  (I blogged about aprons once upon a time; if you're interested in visiting my archives you can read that post here.)

I have a proverbial wardrobe of aprons, actually.  Holiday-themed ones even.

My Mrs. Clause apron.  (And a darling chocolatey-faced elf!)

Anyway, Leila Lawler is a seamstress.  (See, there's another thing we have in common.  She even said in one post that in spite of being at it for 40 years, she tends to make lots of mistakes and relies heavily on a seam-ripper.  Me, too!  I'm beginning to think we might be twins who were separated at birth!)  After reading some of her old sewing posts, I felt motivated to organize my sewing room for the first time in ages.  In one of the big plastic bins that held some of my fabric stash, I found some fun treasures that I'd almost forgotten about, including a few unfinished projects that I decided I'll have to get to ASAP.  (I'm not getting any younger, you know.  I'll be 66 in July.  If I don't finish them now, then when?!)

I found a patchwork quilt that I began to put together in the late 1970's, while I was still in college (it was for my "hope chest," kind of), and then continued to work on after my husband and I got married in 1980 and started having our sons.  It was made with soft, almost threadbare squares of fabric, taken from old clothing and scraps from craft projects I'd worked on. (BTW, what was I thinking making the squares so small?!  Each is only 5"!)  I'd added some appliquéd hearts, with the names and birthdays of the first two boys on them; the next two sons each have a heart appliqué with their names and birthdates penciled in, but I never got around to embroidering them; and the fifth son never even got a heart on there before I abandoned this quilting project (probably because I was too busy raising said boys, four little guys who were born within a span of four years and three months).  Son #4, the last one represented on this quilt, is 36 now, so it's been more than three decades since I did any work on it!

Finally finishing that decades-old quilt is on my to-do list now.

I also found the top of a baby quilt that was made by my best college friend in 1983, as a gift for our firstborn son.  This quilt originally had batting inside and the layers were hand-tied together with yarn at some of the corners where the rectangular pieces on the front met.  After washing it a number of times, the batting got all lumpy, and I took it apart, planning to put new batting in it and then put it back together, possibly doing some machine quilting, too, so it would hold up better.  But alas, I never got around to it.  My friend had made it before she knew whether we were having a girl or a boy, and it had an awful lot of pink in it.  When we kept having boys, I put it away to save in case we ended up with a daughter, but we never did.  Our oldest son has six girls now, and one boy, and the youngest, a girl, is still a baby.  So I think I'm going to fix it up and pass it on to him for his little one.

How fun!  I had almost forgotten that baby quilt existed!

Another treasure I found was a zip-lock bag with some pre-cut 8" quilt squares in it.

What is special about these squares is that most of them (all but the dark blue, which I must have gotten as a filler) are Laura Ashely fabrics, taken from sheets, pillowcases, and curtains that we used to have in our bedroom. Way back in the early years of our marriage, my mother-in-law (a T J Maxx clearance shopping pro who had no equal!) gifted us a king-sized Laura Ashley puff/bedspread (in the dusty blue with little cream-colored flowers on it).  We had a double bed at the time, but she said we would probably go bigger eventually, and she wanted it to fit.  We had that puff on our double bed for about ten years, before we finally got a king-sized bed in 1993.  By that time, my M-I-L had gifted us sheets (in the coordiating cream with little dusty blue flowers), curtains, pillow shams, and throw pillows in that same pattern.  Then eventually, she got us a new king-sized quilt, in the floral pattern that had some pink in it but was in the same color palette and still went with the curtains from the other pattern we'd had for so long, and a king-sized sheet set (top right fabric square in the picture) to go with it.  

We slept on Laura Ashley bedding for so many years that when we finally made the switch to something different, I wanted to have a little memento of it.  So I'd cut out those squares, intending to make a little throw quilt.  But like so many other projects I'd started over the years, I never got around to sewing those squares together.

Well, guess what I did today?

It's not very big, just a lap quilt.  It just needs a back (I'm not sure I'm even going to do a layer of batting inside).  I'll probably keep it draped over the back of the upholstered arm chair in our room, as a reminder of those early days of our marriage.  And of my beloved mother-in-law as well.

I found some other goodies that had belonged to her--beautiful linen-and-lace napkins, pillowcases, pillow shams, etc. (some bought new on clearance, some vintage, some with lovely embroidery on them, many stained from decades stored in the attic after the house fire at my husband’s childhood home).  And I have projects planned for them as well.  So stay tuned for more sewing talk in the coming weeks, dear readers.

Or not!  I realize that this post might have been boring to many of you. (But perhaps it wouldn't be to Auntie Leila?)

Sewing, and Thinking of My Mother-in-Law

I meant to write a blog post about my mother-in-law on Nov. 1, her birthday, but family events down here in VA kept me busy and the date got away from me.  We had a tornado watch on Halloween, so trick-or-treating was postponed until the next day.  And after all the excitement was over, I was too tired to blog...but here I am, a day late and a dollar short, as I usually am these days.

Mom would have been 87 this year.  I can't believe she's been gone 10 years already!  I still miss her and I always will.  I don't think it was an accident that she was born on All Saints Day: never was there a woman more devoted to Our Lord and Our Blessed Mother; never was there a woman who said more Rosaries and novenas for her loved ones.  (She was a daily communicant whenever she was in a season of her life where this was possible, and never was there a woman who would be more thrilled by the fact that her birthday is a holy day of obligation, a day on which all of the children she raised in the Faith would be sure to get to Mass!)

I met this amazing woman--daughter of an Irish immigrant father who died when she was 10, sister to one older brother, and mother to eight children (four boys, four girls)--when I was 15 and started to date her oldest son.  From that very first meeting, I just adored her.  She had that gift of making you feel loved and important, without making too much of a fuss doing it.  She was the best mother-in-law a girl could ever ask for--my role model now that my boys are married; she never judged or interfered, just accepted and supported.

Mom had the soprano voice of an angel--she could seriously have been a professional singer, but she shared her gifts in the church choir instead.  She was a breathtaking beauty, but the least vain person I ever knew.  She was a lover of all things beautiful for the home: china, crystal, Hummels and other figurines, Nativity scenes and Christmas decorations in general, and last but certainly not least, FABRIC.  Mom considered all of these things true works of art and could hardly resist them (particularly if she found them in the aisle marked "clearance sale").  Her attic was filled to the rafters with boxes and bins of every kind of fabric you could imagine, along with laces, ribbons, and all sorts of other sewing notions.  It was like JoAnn Fabrics up there, truly.

In 1997, my in-laws' house caught fire (caused by outdated, faulty electrical wiring) while they were away visiting some of their children.  Fortunately, their home was not completely lost.  But due to the smoke and water damage, the interior had to be mostly gutted and rebuilt.  After the fire, the attic had to be cleared out and the fabric collection assessed, and some of it was too damaged so it was thrown out.  But a remarkably large amount of mom's precious materials (which I'm sure she had many plans for using in the future) were saved and put back up in the attic.

So these days, whenever I need some material for a sewing project, I "go shopping" up there first.  That's where I found the piles of exquisite white linen-and-lace pillow shams that I used to make my grandkids' christening gowns.  And at the end of the summer (which we'd spent living in my husband's childhood home in Upstate NY, while taking care of our nearby Oyster Haven VRBO house), I took a trip to the attic and brought home some plaids for myself and my daughter-in-law Regina, who wanted to make a Christmas stocking for her little boy.  She had already made them for her four daughters, using plaid material from Mom's attic; but she'd run out and asked if I could look for more.

My grandson, Topper, recently turned one.  His mom, my daughter-in-law Ginger, is a huge fan of vintage-style clothes for her three little boys, and I knew she'd appreciate a new Jon Jon romper as a birthday gift for him.  Well, it just so happened that I had some perfect pieces of material from Mom's attic to make some garments for the upcoming holidays: a hunter green velveteen that I'd found a few years ago, and those lovely plaids I'd unearthed this past summer.  So I decided to make two rompers!

I like to put "made by" tags in the garments I sew for the grandkids, in case they get handed down to a new generation someday.  Topper's two older brothers call me "Ree Ree" instead of Grammy, so that's what I put on the tags for these two Jon Jons.

I could hardly wait to see how these rompers would look on my adorable grandson, who has the most heart-melting smile and edible chunky thighs.

All I can say is that I think my dear mother-in-law would approve of how her stash of fabric is being put to use.  Yes, I think she would very much approve indeed!  And I hope these pictures of her great-grandson wearing rompers made out of some of the pieces she lovingly chose from the clearance racks at JoAnn's are making her smile.

Miss you, Mom!  And when I grow up, I want to be just like you...because I believe you were born on All Saints Day for a reason.

A Tribute to My Mother-in-Law

Today is the 9th anniversary of my dear mother-in-law's death.  She was born on All Saints Day and died on Holy Saturday; I think that pretty much sums up all you need to know about Mom and her special relationship with Our Lord and Our Lady, whom she loved so much.  She was a beautiful soul, with deep and abiding faith and an abundance of love for her family, and she is missed by so many.

I wanted to write a new post today in honor of the best mother-in-law a girl could ever dream of having; but I'm finding myself at a loss for some reason.  So instead, I'm going to share an old post I wrote about Mom, a birthday tribute from 2013.  Click here if you'd like to read it..

Gone, but never forgotten.  We miss you, Mom (and Dad), and we love you.

Remembering Mom on All Saints Day

When I was in the throes of raising a passel of boys (who were extremely close in age, with the exception of #5, the baby--who took his sweet time joining the fray, after a five-year hiatus), my next-door-neighbor, the mother of two girls spaced four years apart, always used to say, "You're a saint."

As if.

If only.

If merely being the mother of five boys was all it took, I would be golden.  But I'm quite sure that there is a lot more to achieving sainthood than that.

My mother-in-law, who died on Holy Saturday in 2009, was born on All Saints Day in 1931.  And how fitting indeed, because I believe she is a saint.  She would have been 82 today, and she is sorely missed by her many children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren.  I met Mom when I was a shy 15-year-old who'd started dating her oldest son (the second-born in a household that included four sons and four daughters), and from the moment I knew her, she was a figure who loomed--and still looms--large in my life.  I can hardly imagine my life without her in it.

Mom, when she was young and single.  She was quite a beauty.

We were talking once about raising kids, and how hard it is to name guardians who will raise them for you if, God forbid, both you and your spouse die while they're still young.  And what she said impressed me so, because as a mother to toddlers and babies at the time, I could not imagine a single soul on earth who could come even close to loving my children the way I did.  (Shame on me for the sin of pride; shame on me for my weak faith in God, who surely loves them more than I do and would have seen to it that they thrived in my absence.)  She said that when her kids were growing up and she thought about that terrible possibility of not being there for them, it wasn't whether or not someone else could love them that worried her.  She knew others could do that, maybe not as well as she did, but well enough.  [And just an aside here: how right she was, because her eight tight-knit offspring are just about the most lovable bunch you've ever met.]  What scared her was that the children God had given her would not be raised with the morals she wanted them to have and a deep love of, devotion to, and connection with the Catholic Faith.  Faith was everything to Mom; she was the novena-sayer extraordinaire, a longtime daily Communicant, and a great friend of the Blessed Mother and the saints.

Well, Mom did live to see her children reach adulthood, all with their Faith intact.  Well done, good and faithful servant!  In a world where so many Catholics have lost their Faith entirely, or remain Catholics in name only ("C and E Catholics," they're sometimes called), Mom's brood continues to embrace their Faith and to pass it on to their children.  There isn't a greater legacy than that.  None of them would think of missing a Sunday Mass.  And I find it so absolutely fitting that every year on Mom's birthday, her children (and their children, and their children, hopefully) will be sure to attend Mass--to celebrate the feast of All Saints, to fulfill their obligation to attend Mass on one of the holy days on the Church calendar...and in doing so, they will also honor this woman they loved so much.

Mom with her oldest grandchild (our firstborn son) in 1985.

I've been thinking so much lately about being a mother, hoping that I've done okay at it; and I've been thinking about the fact that this vocation provides many opportunities for sainthood.  Several bloggers whose sites I visit regularly have obviously been doing the same thing.  I read this post by Rachel over at Testosterhome yesterday, and it really resonated with me.  It made me realize that all that time spent worrying that I'm not doing as good a job as this mother or that one, or that my sons' mothers-in-law will be more fun than I am, or better at expressing affection verbally (because as Jane Austen said of writers--which I guess I am, although it still feels funny to say it:  they are often not very good talkers*), is a complete waste of time.  Instead, I should love my children as well as I can--with the personality and gifts God has given me--and embrace my "littleness."  As a flawed and sinful human, these words are easy to say, but sometimes hard to put into practice.  Yet the saints embraced such humility with joy.  Susan over at Sole Searching Mama also had a poignant recent post on this topic, if you'd like to check that out.

Mom probably didn't waste as much time as I do wondering about the job she did as a mother; she just did what needed to be done, and she did it with a lot of laughter, love, and faith.  If I could be half the mother to my five that she was to her eight, that would be quite an accomplishment.

Happy Birthday to a mother who is a role model for us all.  We hope you're having a great birthday, surrounded by all the friends you were so devoted to during your time here with us!

And Happy All Saints Day!

*from Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen

Remembering Mom

Today is All Saints Day, and it is also my late mother-in-law's birthday. Before age made it too difficult for her to do so, she loved to go to daily Mass and was a daily commmunicant. I think it is fitting that this deeply devout Catholic woman was born on a day honoring the saints--a holy day of obligation when all faithful Catholics go to Mass in remembrance of them.

My mother-in-law grew up with just one older brother and lost her father when she was only ten years old. She was not used to big families, and she said that if anyone had told her when she was young that she was going to have eight children, she'd never have believed it. But that's just what she did: she raised eight outstanding children--four boys and four girls--with my wonderful late father-in-law; and if any set of parents was meant to bring a lot of children into the world, it was those two.

My mother-in-law was stunning, a raven-haired Irish beauty with almost translucent blue-green eyes. As a senior in college, she was voted Rose Queen. Even in her later years, when her hair was snow white and her health was deterioriating, she was beautiful; she was the kind of person whose smile and laughter absolutely lit up the room. But Mom had no vanity and was in fact self-deprecating.

This woman could sing like an angel, but was always shy about having to get up in front of a crowd and do it. As a young girl, she attended summer music camps, and her soprano voice was so exquisite that it could have launched a professional career. She never became a professional singer; but she did sing at weddings and at her parish church every Sunday--making that congregation a truly lucky bunch, that's for sure.

Mom didn't consider herself a great beauty or a great singer; she didn't identify herself as a teacher, either, even though she taught for many years, starting when her younger four children were almost school-aged. Above all else, it was her role as mother that defined her.

My mother-in-law spent much of her time praying for her children and their many intentions. When one of her daughters-in-law was trying desperately to have a fourth child, she began a novena for her. Not only did that daughter-in-law conceive, but just about every woman of childbearing years Mom knew, all up and down the east coast, did, too! And that included one of Mom's daughters and myself (so three of Mom's thirty-two grandchildren were born within six days of each other)! Everybody joked about that novena, "Mom, stop praying! It's too strong!" But I feel like I have my mother-in-law to thank for my #5 son, and I can't even imagine my life without him in it.

Mom is missed so much by the children she adored and their families. It's sad that we can't see her anymore; it's sad that we can't go to her with our problems, knowing we'll find a loving and sypmathetic ear, and ask her to say one of her super-powerful novenas. She always did seem to have a direct line when it came to praying. And you know, I believe this special woman born on the Feast of All Saints still hears us, and the line might be more direct now than ever. So we're going to just keep talking to you, Mom, and I'm sure you'll be listening.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Holy Saturday (and St. George's Day!)

Today is Holy Saturday and I'm thinking of my late mother-in-law. This wonderful woman was born on All Saints' Day and two years ago, she died very suddenly on Holy Saturday. She was a woman of such deep faith, it seems only fitting that she would enter and exit this life on such holy days.




As you can see from this photo, my mother-in-law was as beautiful on the outside as she was on the inside.


Rest in peace, Mom. We miss you.



I'm also thinking of my dad today, because April 23 is the feast of St. George, the Patron Saint of England. In case you're not familiar with him, St. George is usually depicted riding on a white horse while slaying a dragon with a long spear.



My father--"Bigfoot" to his grandchildren--is a proud descendant of English royalty (I kid you not) and a fanatic Anglophile. He likes to remind everyone that St. George performed much greater deeds than Ireland's St. Patrick, dragons being a whole lot tougher to slay than snakes; he laments that much is made of St. Patrick, while his favorite saint is under-appreciated.



In general, Bigfoot just likes teasing people of Irish descent, and that includes my mother, about the superiority of all things British. (Will the British ever stop oppressing the Irish?) But I do believe Bigfoot genuinely admires St. George. So pip-pip, cheerio, and Happy St. George's Day, everyone!

Making Christening Dresses

My late mother-in-law was a gifted seamstress. She was also a talented smocker, and hand-smocked many heirloom dresses: prom dresses for her daughters; Flower Girl/First Holy Communion dresses for her granddaughters; baby and christening dresses. She adored fabric and had amassed an enormous collection of it over her lifetime; she believed that beautiful pieces of fabric are true works of art, and just looking at the patterns on them brought her joy.

In three lifetimes, she never would have had enough time to use up all the fabric that she'd collected, but I know that when she looked at a piece she loved, she could see its potential and in her imagination had planned out exactly what she would make out of it when she got the chance.

Recently, I went "fabric shopping" at her house, hoping to find some pretty white material to make two christening gowns for my oldest son and his wife, who are expecting twins. I came upon a plastic storage container filled with a neat stack of pristine, still-in-their packages, white linen pillow shams (twelve in all), replete with decorative cut-outs and delicate embroidery. They are just exquisite--which is probably the exact reason why they were never used for their intended purpose. I'm sure my mother-in-law was saving them because she saw the potential for creating something wonderful out of them. It wouldn't surprise me if she was thinking about using them to make christening gowns for her great-grandchildren. It seemed that they were just what I was looking for! I got permission from my husband's sisters to bring them home with me. Then I picked up two different patterns at JoAnn's. (I couldn't make up my mind which one I liked better, so I bought them both, as they were on sale for the unbelievably low price of 99 cents apiece. My mother-in-law, who was the bargain shopper extraordinaire, would have been proud!)

I will have to carefully take apart the seams of the pillow shams and then figure out how to piece them together to best showcase the embroidered areas on the dresses. I wish my mother-in-law was here to guide me, because she was an old pro at this sort of thing. I usually sew using large flat pieces of fabric cut from a bolt. But I'm really anxious to see if I can create some heirloom christening gowns for my first grandchildren using the beautiful linen pillow shams that belonged to their great-grandma.

Later on, when I'm finished, I'll post the "after" picture.

Where has all the glamour gone?

I love to take pictures--especially of people (my children in particular). I have taken thousands of pictures over the past thirty years. I started out with a cheap Instamatic camera, then advanced to a cheap Kodak 35 mm one. Every time I took my film in to be developed, I ordered double prints so that I could send photos of my kids on to their grandparents--crossing my fingers, hoping that there were some decent shots in there. (There were usually some real duds, and even the good ones were often dark, overlit, or just plain blurry and grainy.

I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven when my husband gave me my first digital camera as a Mother's Day gift in 2003. To be able to delete the bad ones and zoom and crop the good ones--what a joy! The clarity! The color! The instant gratification! (All little ones nowadays immediately say, "Let me see!" and grab for the camera the second you've taken their picture!) How had I survived twenty years of raising my beautiful boys, I wondered, without this marvelous invention that would have captured their every expression so perfectly? But better late than never. When I looked at the digital action shots I snapped during my boys' high school lacrosse games, I felt like a Sports Illustrated photographer. I could never have gotten pictures like those with my old-fashioned cameras.

We think we've come such a long way with photography, and it's true, we have. But my very favorite portrait photos will always be those glamourous black-and-white head shots from the forties and fifties. Just look at the picture of my mom.  She looks like a movie star in her engagement photo.  Of course, she would have been gorgeous no matter what type of camera snapped this shot (she's 75 now and still gorgeous), but still!

And this my mother-in-law, a light-eyed, dark-haired stunning Irish beauty. So classy and elegant. Was everyone a movie star back then?

I've always thought I was born a little too late, that the world has gotten too modern for me. When I look at these beautiful images of the women in my family, I am transported to another time. I wish I had just one fifites-style black-and-white photo of myself to put beside the ones of these women; but I'm not very photogenic, so even fifties photography may not have been able to give me that aura of glamour! 

Well, the glamour may be gone, but all in all, I'm glad we're in the age of digital photography. I have two grandchildren on the way, and I hope they're ready for their close-ups!