Chicken Soup for the African American Woman's Soul by Jack Canfield Read Free Book Online Page A

definitely is NOT me. I can walk a fifteen minute mile, I work out every day, and my steps are quicker than they were at twenty-five. No, I definitely DO NOT look like my mother. I’d still sneak a peak in the mirror, just to be sure.
    As I prepared to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, I woke up excited and happy to be alive. As I passed the full-length mirror in the corner of my bedroom I caught a glimpse of a startling figure. I stopped and took a good long look. I could not believe my eyes. There she was staring back at me—my mother. When did this happen? As I looked, rather than being upset or in denial over the remarkable resemblance that had somehow eluded me all these years, I found a strange comfort in looking at my mom’s and my image comingling in the mirror.
    Suddenly, I saw something more than just our physical similarities. I saw beyond the thinning of the hair and the expanding midsection to the strength and courage she had always displayed in the face of tragedy—and that she had given me. I saw the determination that had helped her break free of the shackles of poverty and pain—a determination that she had given me. I saw her spiritual teachings—the ones that helped to shape and mold my own values and beliefs. I saw her commitment to hard work—the commitment that she taught me so that I could achieve my goals and dreams. I saw the love and appreciation that she held for her family that she passed on to me so that I may honor and cherish my own family. Yes, as I looked in the mirror, I realized that it was her love of life that taught me to live my life to the fullest and that allowed me to wake up that very day thankful to be alive.
    Today, when I look at my mother, I am amazed at how much she looks like her mother and yes, how much I look like her.
    Now, when people say to me, “You look just like your mother,” a loving warmth spreads through me, and I simply smile, nod and proudly say, “Thank you.”
    Linda Coleman-Willis

Mama’s Hands
    When I was a child, I thought that my mama had the prettiest hands. They were brown and smooth, the fingers long and slender. Her nails were always perfectly rounded and polished a bright shade of red. I never once saw her polish them, but I know that she did. Even before the days when there were nail shops in every strip mall, beauticians gave manicures—but not to my mama. She never indulged herself in things just for herself. Her every indulgence was for her family.
    Mama still has the prettiest hands. Her nails are still perfectly rounded and polished a bright red—these days by a manicurist. Her hands are no longer smooth. Time has added wrinkles and a spot or two, and veins more pronounced. Hers look like the hands of a fifty-year-old woman—a woman my age. Mama is eighty.
    Hands tell tales. Hers tell of sewing countless beautiful dresses with sashes that tied into big bows for her two little girls, bell-bottom pants and prom dresses for her teenagers—until her daughters got too highfalutin to wear “homemade” clothes.
    The last dress Mama made for me was a wedding dress.
    It was not the dress—or the wedding—she had dreamed of for her first daughter. But, I was in luv . In the ’60s, “living together” was the clarion call of the new women’s liberation. It was actually men’s liberation, but that’s a story for another day. To Mama, it was “shacking up,” and no daughter of hers was going to live in sin. She would disown me first. I would become a twenty-one-year-old orphan. So while my beloved and I agreed that we didn’t need a piece of paper or a fancy wedding to validate our love, Mama disagreed. She expressed it by refusing to speak to me.
    Nowto say that Mama and I had had our differences during my adolescent years would be an understatement of gargantuan proportion.Our disagreements were numerous and loud . Louder on her part because those