My little one came to me in tears.  She’d been playing with the Christmas ornaments even though I repeatedly explained they were not toys.  She said she was so sorry; that she’d broken one and put it in the recycling.  I asked her which one and discovered it was from the first Christmas Burk and I spent married.  I had never had a house and I’d had my new last name put on it.  She was sobbing and I told her that even though she should not have been playing with them I knew it was an accident.  I went to the recycling expecting to find it shattered.  Instead I was surprised to find most of it intact.  As we go through life, all of us have little pieces of ourselves that get broken for one reason or another.  It’s how we choose to deal with them that makes or breaks us.  Feminist writer Virginia Woolf said, “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”  Sometimes a lot of shattered fragments make a beautiful mosaic.  Or we can sweep them under the rug and pretend nothing ever got broken.  Our little ornament is still salvable.  I told her I was so proud of her for coming to me and telling me.  I think it is a testament to her character that she owned up to it, didn’t try to put the blame on anyone else, and told the truth.  I feel guilty to this day because I broke Mama and Daddy’s wedding cake topper and blamed it on the cat; poor Snowflake.  As this year closes I am trying to gather broken pieces of my own mostly because it has been a year since Mama has been gone.  I realize at least I have some; they just need to be repurposed into the mosaic of my life and my daughter’s.  We will always miss her, but brightly colored pieces of her that cannot be dimmed still shine their way through.  I will not let them fade with the passing of time.  And this mosaic will become part of others in the years to follow.  It already carries strong pieces of a Choctaw matriarch I never knew.  Then came pieces so elegant from my Grandmother Maris.  Daddy’s pieces have been the most prevalent, carrying wisdom, positivity, and perseverance.  Now Mama has added her own funny ones, soft ones, and beautiful ones and rather than try and bury them I choose to gather them all up and wrap them about me like a patchwork quilt.  The mosaic of my daughter has already started.  I think it carries seeds of greatness as its foundation.  From my side alone she has inherited the blood of French royals, Choctaw spirit and Irish fire.  And so our little ornament cannot hang anymore but it still exists; altered but standing.  It does not stand defeated, rather it stands open, proudly full of the memories from its past with room and hope for those yet to come.