There is no need for mother’s pot in my kitchen; it has become an emblem of the past, an ornament in my living room. Mother cannot understand our manner of cooking, the manner I learned _away_ from home. She cannot eat the foods we have; her plate at meals was left almost untouched. She does not understand my white kitchen, used only for cooking. When she came into my kitchen, my maid asked her quickly, eager to please her, pleasantly and respectfully, “What can I do for you?” So mother went out to the porch, and she looked out upon the tree-shaded street. And an infinite loneliness was hers, a loneliness at thought of the crowded, homely ghetto street, where every one goes about in shirt sleeves, or apron and kimono, where every one knows his neighbor, where every one speaks mother’s speech. She cannot understand my friends, nor they her. I am the only thing here that is part of her life. I for whom those hands of hers are hard and worn, and her eyes weary with the stitching of thousands of seams. She helped me to come into this house, to reach the quiet peace of this street. And she has come to see this place whither she toiled to have me come; and now that she came to see my goal she was afraid, lonely. She did not understand. There is nothing that we have in common, it may appear, this mother of mine, and I, the mother of my son. Her life has lain always within the four dim walls of her ghetto home. And I have books, clubs, social service, music, plays. My motherhood is a privilege and an experience which is meaningful not only to my son and to me, but to my community. In this short visit of hers, for the first time mother saw me as that which I had always wished to be, an American woman at the head of an American home. But our home is a home which, try as I may, we cannot make home to mother. She has seen come to realization those things which she helped me to attain, and she cannot share, nor even understand, them. But there is one thing we have in common, mother and I. We have this woman that I am, this woman mother has helped me to become. And I shall always remember that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if I am truly part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand America, who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive to be, I can find a finer example than my own mother! There are many men and women who have gone, as I have, far from that place where we started. When I think of them lecturing on the platform, teaching in schools and colleges, prescribing in offices, pleading before the bar of law, I shall never be able to see them standing alone. I shall always see, behind them, two shadowy figures who will stand with questioning, puzzled eyes, eyes in which there will be love, but no understanding, and always an infinite loneliness.