Mother's Day earrings to Mother's pendant

Happy Birthday to Me!

My birthday present this year came in a day early, instead of two days late, as anticipated. But I finally did something I've wanted to do for years now--I turned my pretty opal earrings into something I could actually wear.

This piece is particularly meaningful, and I'm wanting to be wordy about it, so I'm pulling out the blog, even though my last entry was only yesterday.

Just a few months after we were married, Terry and I were on one of our mall-walking/window shopping dates. Gazing through the window of a jewelry store, I saw the most perfect opal earrings. They were the same shape, color, and setting as the opal on my engagement ring. I fell completely in love with them, but we were students and they were $90. But, come Mother's Day, my sweetheart presented me with the earrings I coveted. I laughed at the thought of him giving me a Mother's Day gift, since we had no children and were not even expecting any at that point. But he insisted that I was the mother in our family, and would eventually become the mother to our children. So I wore the earrings for the promise of motherhood.

I wore those earrings almost every day for the next few years--through two failed pregnancies and one more successful. My ears had always had a tendency to become infected, but I ignored that, and tried to overlook the fact that no matter how many times I cleaned my ears and the earrings, I would have to clean crusted blood and gunk from the earrings each night. Thinking back on it now, I suspect that it may have to do with the blood clotting problem I have. But that's just a suspicion. At any rate, after I had Marty, earrings were pretty much not an option for a while (she would put herself to sleep by rubbing my ears). So the earrings took a prized place in my jewelry box for a while.

My years of no earrings because of babies let my ears finally heal, but they also closed over. But I loved my earrings and wanted to wear them again, so once Linda was old enough to trust, I had my ears re-pierced--just so I could wear my Mother's Day earrings again. But that didn't work, either, as my ears simply kept getting infected. So at last, I determined that I'd simply have to turn the stones into a custom piece of jewelry. But I really had no idea how to go about doing that, so the earrings remained in my jewelry box.

Finally, just a few weeks ago, in keeping with this trend of facing my fears and doing things I've always wanted to do but was either too afraid or too cheap to do (i.e. get a car, frame my painting, even consider going back to school), I started going into jewelry stores and making inquiries about how to go about designing a new piece to set my opals into--actually not too easy since not all jewelers will do custom work, and even fewer will consider working with opals. But I found a place that would do it, found a basic design that was actually quite perfect to fit the 2 opals into, and even added the girls' birthstones (emerald for Marty, citrine for Chrissy, alexandrite for Linda--all synthetic, because I'm still cheap, after all).

So now, my Mother's Day earrings that were given to me two full years before I even became a mother, but represented the hope for motherhood, are now part of a beautiful pendant that I can wear proudly to display that hope achieved.