MOTHER'S JEWELRY
“Teenage me was annoyed by her opulence, her Zsa Zsa Gabor hair, her whole ethos of extravagance.”
The angriest I ever saw my mother was the day I came home from high school wearing my first pair of jeans. “I’m not raising a daughter to run around in dungarees!” she cried, spitting the words at the kitchen counter, too upset to even look at me. She herself dressed up every day of her life—I suspect for the same reason she loved wearing showy jewelry: simply because she could.
Mother was born in 1914, the oldest of four, and took over the care of her siblings when her mother died, when she was 12. Coming of age during the Great Depression, she learned how to make something from almost nothing. She fashioned my brother’s pants from our father’s worn-out trousers and made my older sisters’ prom dresses without patterns. She darned socks using a light bulb. She baked and cooked from scratch, no recipes needed.
Though she wasn’t able to go to college, she had an entrepreneurial spirit. She saved enough from running a little beachside hotdog stand to open a beauty parlor. My father, who dropped out of college in 1929 when his father lost their walnut farm, refurbished cars and motorcycles until he could afford to start building homes. By the time I was in elementary school, Mother had sold the beauty parlor and we were very comfortably well-off. But she never spent money like a person of wealth. Her over-the-top jewelry, like the crystal, porcelain and silver that filled our house, came secondhand from junk stores.
She loved trawling for treasure. She had a good eye, and she was patient. She’d bring home her finds—elaborate gold rope chains, $20 gold coins she envisioned as pendants, rose gold watches adorned with rubies and diamonds—and get to work, painstakingly picking out embedded dirt with needles and tweezers, washing and polishing until the pieces were unrecognizable from their former selves. She took great pleasure in giving her treasures as gifts, but I wanted no part of them. Teenage me was annoyed by her opulence, her Zsa Zsa Gabor hair, her whole ethos of extravagance.
She died of ovarian cancer at 62, when I was 23. When we laid her jewelry on the dining table, I chose her four-inch cameo brooch, her heavy gold cuff with a ruby-festooned horseshoe and lasso trim of braided gold, hammered-gold earrings and a massive cocktail ring I once wore to a Sopranos party to great effect. Later, I re-designed the ring to be my engagement ring, and enough stones were left over to make a diamond-studded band and a circle pattern necklace. My sisters and I began to wear her jewelry more. We’d laugh and tease that we were becoming more like her as time without her passed.
In the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, I Iost my home and everything I owned. I still have these hammered-gold earrings and the pieces I refashioned from the cocktail ring only because I was wearing them when the fire came. The rest of Mother’s jewelry was destroyed, as were her cranberry-glass vases, her silver cruet set with the matching cut-glass bottles, her ornate candelabras that my kids had used for playing Beauty and the Beast, and the childhood photo I’d found after she died: her and her three siblings, every one of them wearing dungarees.
When I was growing up, our nightly dinners included pot roast, pounded veal cutlets, leg of lamb and filet of sole, always from the best meat shop or fishmonger, with pie for dessert because my father loved pie, or pineapple upside-down cake. Occasionally, though, if we begged hard enough, Mother made us what she called “poor-farm food”: chipped beef on toast, macaroni and cheese, pastry-scrap cookies topped with cinnamon and sugar. It would be years before I knew that other people called this “comfort food.” I guess you could say these pieces, all I have left from my mother now, are becoming my comfort jewelry.
—Betty-Jo Tilley
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beautiful!
I love these memories of your mother and her resourcefulness. A lovely story❤️