For years I tried to figure out my mother.  She is not warm, fuzzy or maternal in any way.  Complimenting one of her children for anything, even if one of us won the Nobel Peace Prize, would be out of the question.  She does however feel it is her job to point out any and all of your faults or failings so you can improve yourself.  She never nurtured, she managed. After years of struggle and more than one personal crisis and beating myself over the “why doesn’t my mother love me”, I finally came to the conclusion that it isn’t her fault or mine.  The poor woman was born at the wrong time!  She came into the world in 1925 a good 40 years too soon. Before she got married, she worked in a department store and was very into fashion. She had started going to New York for buying trips. I’m sure she loved that. Then she got married as women of her era were supposed to do. Then she had kids, which was expected. If she had been born in 1965 instead of 1925 I bet she would have had a very successful career. She was smart, capable and had a great eye for clothing.  She would have been much better at managing people than raising children. I imagine that there was a faux pas in heavens department of soul matching. They were most likely training a new angel. Anyhow, here they are, the head of the department is explaining how all the souls waiting to be matched are on the second floor. They are divided into rooms by decade. The 1920’s room is filled with men who will work hard, do their patriotic duty and women who are perfect wives and mothers.   The 1940’s and 1950’s rooms hold a confused bunch who want it all – home, career, family. You get my drift. Anyhow, all the buttons for matching the soul with the baby to be born are color coded. The problem is that our new angel recruit is color blind.   When it’s time to give my someday mother a soul, he should have pressed the peach button. What did he do? Hpressed the lavender. I’m not sure how anyone could confuse those two colors. One is warm the other cold. But he did it all the same. Of course the supervisor realized the mistake at some point, but by then it was too late. My mother and others were born decades before they should have been. She and others like her didn’t get to realize their full potential. They were just born before their time. So I’m not mad at my Mom for not being the warm and fuzzy person I wanted her to be.  She did the best she could. I think in her next life she will be the president of the United States or perhaps the Master of the Universe.