Future Inheritance

“A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.”

--Niccolo Machiavelli

  This morning, Lena crawled up one of the barstools and sat there, sleepy and staring, watching me make her breakfast. I saw her notice the heart shaped ring dish that sits beside the kitchen sink. It was my mother’s, as is almost every piece of jewelry that ends up resting in it. I have a few lovely rings, real ones, as Lena calls them, and then heaps and heaps of gold-plated metal, almost all of which were my mother's or my grandmother's before they were mine.

She stared at the little collection mindlessly and picked up her spoon. She started eating her cereal.
"Mom, you sure have alotta jewelry."
"Yeah, I guess I do. It was Mimi's."
"Can I ask you a question?" She fiddled with a ring on the dish. "What happens to the jewelry of the moms who don't have daughters?"
Ok, not what I was expecting, but I'm used to that. Lena is good at surprising me. I thought for a minute. "Well I don't know. They probably have someone important, even if they don't have a daughter. Like, Aunt Tasha doesn't have a daughter, but she has you. Her jewelry, or some of it, might go to someone like you."
"Oh!" Lena's eyes lit up. With just a few sentences, I had doubled her fortune. I made a mental note to call my sister and warn her that her son's future wife was out of the will. Lena will be expecting all of her jewelry as well as mine, upon our tragic demise. 
"I get it!" she said, fully awake now.  It has ta go to their important people. So it doesn't matter about being a daughter or a mommy. Or even if you're both. Uhh. However that works."
I agreed with Lena and thought about her epiphany. I suppose she's figuring out how material things fit into the way people love eachother. I thought about my mother too, gone for nearly two years now, and myself. We are (were) simultaneously mother AND daughter, at the same time, a concept that has confused my children more than once. How can you be a parent AND a kid?
"But wait, you're a kid? No way. What the...  You're a MOM," Eli explained to me once, as if I had misspoken, or just forgotten myself.
"I am a mom, Eli," I answered. "But I was just like you once. I was born. I was a baby. I was a kid. You know Gramps? He's my DADDY." Lights went off for both of them. "Whoah. No. Wait, wait! Mom! Do you REMEMBER that?"
Oh for the love of God.
The point is we can be mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters all at the same time. One need not rule out another. The way we love eachother certainly does have to do with who gets what when we die, but there are no rules. We can do whatever we want.
"You and Eli, and your Daddy and Tasha and I --We  can do whatever we want with our stuff when we die. But that should be a long way away." Lena listened to my words, and then she positioned the ring dish a little straighter, almost pining.  I missed my mother in that instant and thought how fast it all goes by. I imagined my words penetrating Lena's very soul. I imagined her worrying about my mortality. I tried to reassure her.
"Hopefully you won't get that jewelry for a long time. Not for a long, long time," I said.
"Yeah..." said Lena, wistfully. "I guess that's the bad news."
Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and scooted her cereal bowl into the sink. "Love ya, Mom!" she chirped. And she trotted off to brush her teeth, as if she hadn't just reduced my mortality to a small pile of goldplated metal. She's not worried about any of that. Not yet. She's still all daughter. All sister. The weight of motherhood and balancing the roles we play simultaneously has not yet landed on her, and I hope it doesn't for a long time. Not for a long, long time.