MOTHERS and DAUGHTERS

When my youngest daughter was three, I picked her up after preschool one day and took her with me on a shopping trip to a huge mall.  I promised her an ice cream cone if she was good.  She was an angel, never complaining she was tired or hungry because she knew she would get that ice cream cone.  We sat at a table in a giant food court while she happily licked her cone.  I watched it drip down the front of her white pinafore so wrapped another napkin around the pointy end of the cone.  Except there was no point on the end.  She had bitten off the tip of the cone for some inexplicable reason.  I had to laugh.  I glanced over her shoulder at the table behind her and noticed another mother with her little girl, eating lunch and laughing, much like us.  Except there was a third woman at the table.  The grandmother was there, too.  It was like a punch to my stomach.  My mother had died a year and a half before while I was overseas, and I mourned her death all over again now that we were home.  Tears welled up in my eyes.  But I couldn't cry in a moment of such joy with my baby.  I allowed myself a minute to miss my mother and realize that the three of us would never sit at a table and have an ice cream cone together.  Then I gazed at my daughter's bright eyes and her tiny hand wrapped around the dripping cone and smiled again.  I was looking at joy, God's gift to me.  This moment was imprinted on my mind forever.  I rested in it.  It was enough.