Mothers and Their Untold Stories--Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters for #NationalBookDay #amreading #LGBTQ

Every day is Book Lovers Day for me. However, when I discovered that today is officially Book Lovers Day, I immediately wanted to share with you the last paragraphs of the first chapter of my book, Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters (published by Bella Books). All of my books are like children to me, so I could never choose a favorite. But Tea Leaves was among my first books, and it is about my mother, the first person in the world to me. When I first published it, I received many emails that this book reminded so many women of their mothers and their untold stories.

(Tea Leaves, excerpt--from the end of chapter one)

My mother was a woman who rejected the traditions that bound her mother’s life. Before I was born, she burned her Bibles in the backyard, disgusted with the hypocrisies, the contradictions, and, most of all, the misogyny inherent in the pages that curled into ash. My mother was a woman who tried to invent her own religion and failed. A Transcendental Meditation dropout (“I tried and tried to levitate—to bounce myself off the floor by flexing my butt muscles”), she joined the American Atheists for a few years only to leave in disillusionment (“They served coffee and doughnuts and passed the plate just like all the other idiots!”). She was a woman whose ambitions had been thwarted by circumstance, gender and class. She was a woman who absorbed her mother’s pain, made it her own, and passed it along to her daughter.  When I tried to tell my mother that my grandmother’s life was worthwhile, important, I was trying to convince myself that my life, too, was important.

 “Without Grandmom, the spinners, the weavers, the dyers, without the the patterns the designers thought up could never have been made into anything,” I said. But my words were weak, unconvincing. How could they be anything else, when I was not sure of myself?  

     My mother couldn’t give me what she herself never received. “Whatever I did was never good enough,” she said to me as we sat in the living room. “I never wore the right kind of hat, and even if I did I couldn’t keep it on my head.”

     I laughed and went into the kitchen to fix myself a cup of chamomile tea. As I poured the water into the cup, I noticed a tear in the corner of the bag. A few tea leaves, crushed yellow flowers, seeped into the water and swirled around.  I stared into the white porcelain tea-cup, wondering. What kind of life would I have if knowledge and wisdom were passed uninterrupted and uncensored, from my great-grandmothers down to my grandmother, mother and then to me?  This world shimmered up at me for a fleeting moment. Then I saw the reflection of my mother’s face in mine.  The lines of resignation, her disappointments and her fears stared up at me. 

     I shuddered, then skimmed the floating leaves away with a spoon and went back into the living room. Like my mother, I was a hopeless realist and at the same time I was deep in denial.  I didn’t want to get the stray tea leaves on my tongue. Even if I could have divined the future by reading the tea leaf shapes of dark clouds and crosses, I would not have wanted to. I was wary of astrologists and fortune-tellers.  It was more than a healthy dose of skepticism. It was superstition. I was afraid that if someone told me my future, I would have no choice other than to create that destiny for myself.

     The only omens I could read were the memories of my past. When I was a child I brought home report cards saying I was an underachiever. In elementary school I came home with bit parts in plays in which my mother thought I should star. In junior high, my grades didn’t measure up to study the foreign languages in which she expected fluency.

     When I reminded her of this, she denied it.

     She accused me of wanting her to be better.

     I, in turn, denied that I wanted my mother to be anyone except who she was.

     Neither of us were as sure in our denials as we would have liked to be.

     Only one thing was certain: whichever way we turned the mirror, the reflection came up wanting. My mother was more stubborn than me. Her mind was made up. Their lives, her mother’s and her own, were wasted, good for nothing but survival. No amount of arguing or cajoling could have changed that. But she nodded her head to appease me, and by so doing acknowledged that her life was linked with mine.

You can get copies of Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters at your local library, your local bookstore or wherever books are sold online.

 To order your copy, click here: Tea Leaves: Mason, Janet: 9781594932786: Amazon.com: Books

CINNAMON, my most recent novel, is available  on amazon.com: Cinnamon: A dairy cow’s (and her farmer’s) path to freedom: Mason, Janet: 9781958419786: Amazon.com: Books

CINNAMON is also available through your local bookstore and library

(just ask them to order it if they don’t have it).

For more information on my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders published by Adelaide Books click here.

To learn more about The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

For more information on my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.