The author of the stunning new poetry collection Weapons Grade and the memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent reflects on the true meaning of family jewels.
I’m six and my hand is caught in my mother’s jewelry box, beads running through my fingers like Starbursts. Or I’m 12, and I’m wearing one of her dinner rings turned to face my palm. No one in class knows I’ve got it—until I forget and raise my hand. Or I’m 35, cleaning out my uncle’s house in Florida, and my mother tells me the story of the missing brooch.
Great Uncle Edward traveled the Orient in the thirties as a purser for a big ocean liner, entrusted with the safekeeping of all the passenger’s valuables, especially their jewelry. On the boat he met and later married a very wealthy New York socialite. Over the years, Edward would select interesting jewelry from her collection to give to my mother, his favorite niece. His wife seldom noticed anything missing—the servants often stole, he said. Or was he baiting his wife? He did like to tease. “It’s just a box of rocks,” he’d tell my mother, waving her hesitation aside. Once he made her choose between pieces to see if she would select the only heirloom that was his. He would not help her decide.
She chose an opal set in gold so bright and shiny I understood immediately why she overlooked the real heirloom, a dark ruby brooch. Opulent setting aside, the opal radiates iridescence over a mysterious milky white. It doesn’t shine, it absorbs. A half century later, I find it in her box, its iridescent shimmer perfectly describing my relationship with my mother: a flashing rainbow of emotion, but in no way am I reflected.
Unlike the tough diamond, an opal will shatter after if sharply tapped. I have been estranged from my cigarillo-chain-smoking-scotch-drinking mother for decades. She wanted to be an artist, I became one. Ambition between daughters and mothers can create competition that propels careers—a daughter’s or a mother’s--but it can also smother love. At midlife I imagine inheriting the opal would make me feel secure in her love, if for no other reason than that she’d have given it to me. But I have four sisters, all her rivals as well, who also find its gaudiness alluring. Which one deserves the jewel? As a mother myself, I understand such a dilemma. I too have raised more than one child and yes, they’re both precious and individual. A mother should emanate love to all her children, like the good opal offering all the colors in the spectrum. But there’s only one jewel. She might give it to any of her ambitious daughters—the mother’s prerogative.
