When I was eleven, my mother sent me and my sisters to a summer school sewing class. Even then, technology presented a mystery that didn’t interest me at all, but the sewing machine was my ticket to creating a teen wardrobe for myself that I could afford on money earned from babysitting. I had to rise to the challenge. I remember puzzling over patterns (straight pins fastened thin beige paper to the material just before I cut the fabric); I remember ripping out stitches I’d just sewn in, tears streaming down my face with all the adolescent drama available to me; snarling the bobbin as I tried to install it properly. And Mother would counsel patience.
She seemed kindest to me at these moments; when she suggested I stop and eat something, or simply Why don’t you close up for the day, you’re losing concentration because you’re tired. Or if something was misplaced, she’d trail around the house with any of us, poking into drawers or under beds or lumpy piles of dirty laundry, chanting that familiar entreaty, Dear Saint Anthony, please come around, something is lost and can’t be found. Until we found it. At times like these, it seemed possible that she really did have magical people in the sky doing her bidding.
Affection is all I feel for her when I think of this.
Everyday I noticed her loving my father, simply as part of her fabric. I remember being somewhere in the real world, and Daddy was talking to the person in the real world, the car dealer or the insurance salesman when Mother touched his arm. Even though I was at an age when I didn’t really like the look of his slightly doughy freckled arm, his elbow jutting out of that lightweight yellow short-sleeve shirt, I knew she touched him with love. I knew she loved the man who was attached to that arm.
After she died and her voice no longer mitigated all the intimate circumstances and sloppy goings-on that routinely happen in a family, I realized her love had hidden his faults from all of us. And though there were so very many of us, I always felt her love for me. You carry that with you, being loved by your Mother.
To celebrate the Sunshine Coast launch of A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, I’ve invited several writers and authors I’ve met over the last year to contribute to a series of essays on the theme Mother Love. Check back every week here for a new essay. Click on this icon on the sidebar to take you directly to the page: 
Writers and authors featured: Summer Kinard, Elizabeth Hein, Stephanie Gunning, Julia Osborne, Sydney Avey, Deborah Hining, Judy Strick . . . and more!
Crissy Fowler
Feb 7, 2015 on Goodreads
“made me laugh out loud as well as giggles and tears”
“I enjoyed reading “A Theory of Expanded Love,” by Caitlin Hicks. It created an excitement that lead me to read it quickly so I could find out what happened to the characters in the next chapter. I personally related in more ways than one because, I am from a big family and no one I know, other than brothers or sisters, understands the dynamics of a large family. It is a fictional book, (yet) it reminded me of my own family in those times, the good and the sad. The writer knows how to create images that made me laugh out loud as well as giggles and tears. My thought is that you really can love more as you open your heart to love. There is room for everyone.”
See this reveiw On Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1206346982?book_show_action=true&page=1
