Sharon Phipps Konek

is honored with a Brick from Carol Wolfe Konek.

How can a mother thank the daughter (in-law) who helps her son fulfill his dreams? I realize the dangers of too much or too little praise as I contemplate the social construction of mothers-in-law throughout the ages.

Perhaps no one is as maligned as the witch, unless it is the mother-in-law. Knowing that every son has unfinished business with his mother, and that his wife may be asked to mediate with his mother, how can I not approach this beautiful, talented woman with awe and yearning? I want to befriend her without mothering her. I love the way she loves her mother, whom she describes as her best friend.

Hers is a close family at the center of her emotional life. While she recognizes the differences between her family and ours, she does so with stunning neutrality and acceptance, as a curious traveler between cultures, eager to respect difference while seeking communality.

Sharon Phipps Konek is a designer whose profession allows her to create beauty in the lives of those she assists. She has a discerning eye, a deep appreciation for color, texture, form. She gathers and restores beautiful fabrics and objects from other times, creating comfort and nurturance in nostalgic settings. Her living rooms are rooms for living in, where clusters of dried roses and old laces and tapestries take her visitors back in memory to her grandmother's and their grandmother's time. The faded rose prints framed in gilt recall the romance of another era. Her patio is an outdoor living room where ferns and potted flowers and blooming herbs bring culture and nature into atunement. Her house is quiet, the mood serene.

Meals are beautiful and health giving. She and JD serve bread and fruits and vegetables, sharing shopping and cooking and cleaning in a cooperative way, reviewing their health and lifestyle decisions everyday.

Sharon is an actor. Last night I watched her starring role in a video filmed, edited and produced by JD. I loved this film for the ingenuity and vision of its author, but even more for the way it showed me JD's view of Sharon.

In Tumbleweed Dream, Sharon is a magical being, pregnant with our Sweet Boy, Ian, and with possibility. In the film, I see her openness to my son's magic, and I respond to the spell of their extraordinary sense of play. They both relish the preciousness of what is brief and sparkling in the passing moment. They draw others into the circle of their charmed lives.

In mothering Ian, Sharon is a woman without borders. She and JD have welcomed Ian into what is now, to my amazement, thought of as the "Family Bed." They are a cozy intimate swarm, sleeping and waking in communal harmony. Ian drowses and nurses and drowses again, free of the stresses of an earlier time when parents protected their privacy as they pushed their tiny infants relentlessly toward individualism, and toward competition with the fathers to whom the mothers belonged.

Child-rearing theorists advocated the primacy of the mother-father bond, to which child's needs must be subordinated, necessitating the severing of the parent-child bond before it had been fully realized. Because Sharon and JD question all conventional wisdom, they allow their child to lead and shape and instruct them. He will not be isolated, weaned, force-fed artificial food, circumcised or inoculated mindlessly. With Ian and with each other, they will be attuned, respectful, mindful.

Sharon has the open mind and heart, the love and the generosity to create this family circle of love. As a grandmother, I see what was beyond my imagination as a mother. For this revision, this expansion of my understanding, I am immensely grateful.

When JD was a baby, I knew him to be an imaginative and ethical being who would grow into the wisdom I read in his eyes. As he grew, he tried to be like other people, but inevitably found himself incapable of compromise. He was destined to remain unique, eccentric, a deep soul who revered what was magical and pure. How perfect that he found Sharon, a rare and beautiful being who could be his soulmate, totally generous and original in her devotion to him and to the child they dreamed into being.

When Sharon and JD and Ian encircle each other with their mutual joy, they send out light and calm and hope. They seem to me beings of a future time where all beings will live in harmony and love. How can I thank you, Sharon?

Submitted by Carol Wolfe Konek

September 3, 1998