Mother’s Day

My mom has always been creative and has crafted since I can remember. She’s a retired Ford Motor Company auto worker, an amazing mother to my two sisters and me, sweet wife and companion, grandmother, great grandmother, and friend. My mom is probably the least judgmental person I know, and a big reason I’ve had the confidence to pursue my dreams in life. She has never once told me an idea of mine wasn’t worth investigating, that getting an art degree was pointless, or that she was worried about things not working out for me. More than never naysaying, she’s been encouraging, to all her girls. Without her saying it, I knew she would be there to pick me up if things didn’t work out, so I jumped into finding myself with reckless abandon. Thanks to her support, I found my passion in life, and understand myself better. It may not seem like a big deal, but I know it is, because I’ve heard first hands parents be less supportive of what their kids want out of life.

Aside from all these wonderful attributes of my mom, and I could go on a lot more about them, she is also my glass mentor. She literally taught me how to do what I do for a living. My mom has a total knack for working with glass. Through classes offered by people she worked with at Ford she learned how to fuse glass, and took it up as a serious hobby. I’m not sure when I made my first glass piece with her, but I think it was on a trip home, visiting from collage. I didn’t really like it at first, honestly, so didn’t take note of it. I thought it was cool that she had gotten so into glass fusing, and thought the stuff she made was awesome. She makes such artful, funky, and free pieces that only she could make. I fell in love with glass fusing when I found my voice in the medium. She taught me about dichroic, described the different fusing techniques, and basically let me loose, using any glass of hers I wanted. I feel like I can hear her saying, “Just try it an see”. I’m really not sure if she ever did say that, but the point is it gave me the freedom to experiment, and make mistakes. From that I learned more about the medium than I have anything else. I’m to the point now, that I could teach her a thing or two about the medium, but no doubt, I owe it all to her.

A few years back my mom gave me the first glass piece I ever made. It looked like a leg and I’m still not quite sure what I was thinking about when I look at it.

Thank you, Mom, for your giving spirit. You’re one of a kind, and you’ve made all the years of my life better.