Letters From A Wartime House
Letter Eight: The Life My Mother Built
When I was little, I thought my mom just made dinners.
She made spaghetti on busy weeknights, soup on cold days, the best birthday cakes, and somehow always found a way to put something on the table. Even on the evenings she worked, there was something waiting for Dad to warm up when he got home so we weren’t reaching for takeout. At the time, I thought that was just what moms did.
Now I know it was something much more.
She wasn’t just making meals. She was making home.
As children, we rarely notice the invisible work that holds a family together. We don’t see the grocery lists, the planning, the late nights, or the sacrifices. We simply grow up believing that clean pajamas appear in our drawers, dinner finds its way to the table, and Christmas somehow becomes magical every December.
It isn’t until we become adults that we begin to see all the hands that quietly carried us.
Some of my favourite memories with my mom are the ones where her hands were busy.
Standing side by side in the kitchen making strawberry jam, laughing over homemade strawberry daiquiris while the jars bubbled away on the stove.
Summer afternoons filling the house with the smell of vinegar, dill, and garlic as we canned pickles together.
The soft hum of her sewing machine long after she thought we were asleep.
Coming home from school to discover a brand-new pair of pajamas she’d sewn from scraps of fabric she had rescued from work.
At the time, they were simply pajamas. Now I see them for what they really were. Little pieces of love stitched together after everyone else had gone to bed.
She had a way of turning ordinary things into gifts. Homemade jams tied with ribbon. Handmade goodie bags for the neighborhood kids at Halloween. Thoughtful packages made not because there was a special occasion, but because loving people was reason enough.
Looking back, I think that’s where I learned that the best gifts aren’t always bought, they’re made.
They’re stirred into a pot of jam, sewn into a pair of pajamas or lovingly arranged in an upcycled clementine basket.
These days I find myself stocking my own freezer with homemade meals, baking bread for the week ahead, making hamburger buns because I know they’ll make my family smile, and setting aside little homemade things to share with the people I love.
Some of those things are traditions I inherited from her. Some are things I’ve made entirely my own.
The bread, for instance, is mine.
Mom never really made bread. That little ritual found its way into my life somewhere along the way, and now I can hardly imagine my kitchen without a loaf rising on the counter.
Maybe that’s what I love most about the things our mothers give us.
We don’t simply repeat them, we carry them forward, taking what they taught us and adding pieces of ourselves.
Sometimes I catch myself doing these things and smile, not because I’m trying to become my mother, but because, without realizing it, she is the one who taught me how to love.
As summer begins to wind itself down each year, I celebrate another birthday. This year, I turned 38.
Somehow, 38 makes me look at my mother a little differently.
I find myself remembering what her life looked like when she was my age and wondering…
What was she worried about?
What was she dreaming about?
What did she think her life would become?
What did our little wartime house look like through her eyes then?
At 38, I am standing in that same little wartime house in my memories, but also in a home of my own, raising a family, filling my freezer, baking bread, preserving what our garden gives us, and trying to make this little house feel warm and welcoming to the people who live here.
Every summer, one of the things I look forward to most is gathering in my mom’s kitchen to make pickles.
It isn’t the little wartime kitchen I remember from my childhood anymore. That house belongs to another chapter of our lives, but somehow, standing beside her again with jars lined up and the familiar smell of vinegar, dill, and garlic filling the room, it feels like a thread has never really been broken.
I still haven’t dared to make them on my own. Maybe someday I will… but for now, I like that pickles are still something I get to make with my mom.
Something that belongs to us.
Something I can look forward to every summer.
I can’t help but think about how strange and beautiful it is that I am now living a version of the life she was living when she was my age.
Maybe that’s why one of the greatest compliments anyone can give me is:
“You’re so much like your mother.”
I don’t think I ever fully understood the weight of those words when I was younger.
Now, I treasure them because if I am like my mother, then somewhere along the way I learned to make people feel cared for. I learned that there is something deeply meaningful about putting homemade food on the table, remembering the little things, giving something you made with your own hands, and creating a home where people feel they belong.
I learned that love can be quiet. It can look like a jar of pickles. It can sound like a sewing machine humming from the basement below. It can be a freezer stocked for a busy week, a basket put together simply because someone you love might enjoy it, or a loaf of bread rising on the counter because you’ve made a ritual of it yourself.
Mom, thank you for showing me that love doesn’t always arrive with grand speeches or dramatic moments. Sometimes it’s knowing there would always be something on the table, no matter how busy life became.
Sometimes it’s a little girl coming home from school to find a new pair of pajamas waiting on her bed, never realizing that her mother had stayed up late the night before making them.
I used to think you were teaching me how to cook, sew and preserve the harvest or how to put together a thoughtful gift basket.
Now I realize you were teaching me something far greater.
You were teaching me how to make people feel cared for.
If my own home has become a place where people know they’re welcome, where there’s always something to eat, where homemade gifts are given with love, and where the door is always open…
It’s because you quietly showed me, one ordinary day at a time, what that kind of love looks like.
I hope you know that every loaf of bread I bake, every jar I fill, every meal I prepare, and every gift I make carries a little piece of you with it... and if, when people look at me, they see a little bit of you too, I hope I always remember what a gift that is.
Thank you for making so much more than a home.
Thank you for making me.
With love, until next Sunday,
Allison
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