My mother taught me the power of imagination and parenting, Eartha Kitt style.
“I like to use the freedom of my own imagination.” ~ Eartha Kitt
Video Transcript
So Mother’s Day memories and stories that I would love to share with you. I like to share stories with people about my life with my mother because I was so blessed because my mother told me everyday about how much she loved me. And I think there’s no greater gift you can give a child, for them to know how much that they are loved. And I feel blessings are meant to be shared. And so I share her stories because I pass them along and hope that somebody will take something from them and then maybe share that with somebody else.
I grew up in this house in Beverly Hills that my mother bought in 1957. It sat in a little valley, in the hills, two and a half acres running up the sides. My mother believed that land is the most precious thing you could own. She wasn’t big on furs and diamonds, even though that was her persona on the stage. In real life, she felt, “Give me land or buy land because they’re not making more of it. And that’s what you need to appreciate and we need to treasure and take care of for future generations.” She always felt that if you put good things into the land, it will give you back health and beauty and food and resources. So in this house that I grew up in, we had this land, as I mentioned, and it had paths, meandering little paths up and down the hills, not for the public, but just for us, because my mother really appreciated nature and taught me to appreciate nature and to be amongst nature as much as you possibly can. So after I would come home from school or on the weekends, because I’m an only child, I didn’t have a lot… I didn’t live in a neighborhood where there were a lot playmates. I couldn’t run to somebody’s house to play. I played by myself a lot and entertained myself, and I had these two dogs, a little Apricot Poodle named Baba, that I named myself and a Standard Poodle named Snowball. And they would go on these adventures with me into the hills where we would be conquering lands and we would be, you know, in search of treasures, solving big mysteries, because I was a huge fan of “Nancy Drew” and the “Hardy Boys” mystery books. If you don’t know them, you must read them. They’re corny and so inspiring when you’re a child and you have an imagination like I did. It’s about kids solving crimes.
I was an avid reader, and I had this amazing imagination. I would create in my mind, great escapes and adventures and I’d be conquering lands, and I would be a princess. I was always a princess. But I wasn’t a princess, you know, damsel in distress princess. I was a princess who had her crap together and I was gonna go conquer and take over and save other people.
What I find so interesting about these memories of this time that I would be out venturing on my property, was that my mother would be in the house. Close enough to hear me, maybe even catch a glimpse of me, as I ran past with my trusty sidekicks, allowing me to have this freedom of adventure, have this…use my imagination, create. I didn’t have necessarily set schedules where I was supposed to be doing X, Y, and Z. I was a kid and my mother knew that the power of creating and using your mind to discover the world around you, and to learn on your own. And I know as a mother myself, how hard that is to let your kids figure it out on their own. So this metaphor of my mother, allowing me this freedom to create, is sort of how she parented. She parented by allowing me to figure it out. By not necessarily saying to me, “Don’t do this and don’t do that” because she understood that unless you learn on your own, you really don’t learn it. That’s really hard as a parent to do. I struggle with that with my kids. I have young adults and it’s really hard sometimes to not want to just jump in and fix it and do it for them. I tied my son’s shoelace till I don’t even know how old he was because I was able to do it better, faster, and we’d get out of the house. You know, it’s a disservice, it’s a disservice to them.
I share my mother’s wisdom in my designs.
My mother gave me this incredible gift of figuring it out on their own. But yet, I also knew that she was there, God forbid I should fall in the hills or something should happen, she was close enough to have my back.
It’s just a little insight into my life with my mother that I wanted to share with you. I’m thinking of her, as I do every single day, hard not to when you have her name, but I share her love and her kindness with everyone that comes in contact with me because my mother taught me that being kind to yourself and being kind to those you encounter on a daily basis makes the world just a better place and makes every day for all of us kinder, gentler, nicer.
Be kind to yourself. Be kind to those you reach, you touch.
Tell the people you love how you feel about them even it’s from afar.
Come back and visit soon, simplyeartha.com. I hope everybody’s having a wonderful day.
Click here to read a funny memory of mom. You’ll really like this one.
Remember ~ Treasure ~ Love …. Kitt
2 Response Comments
This made my day. Thank you.
That was beautiful. We used to rent homes, but in them mid 70s they had more land. We used to have rosters and chickens and some Vegis in the form of cactus we call nopales. I appreciate what she did when my father passed and in her early 30s she was left with 5 kids. Love my mom.