To My Mom

It took my mom five years and one miscarriage to conceive my oldest brother.  18 quick months later my next brother came into the world.  He was a collicy baby and he would cry every night for about two hours straight.  When my two oldest brothers were 3 1/2 and 2 and my mom was 31 years old, her parents died suddenly in a plane crash.  A year later my next brother came along.  He had failure to thrive.  Once he was doing better, she popped up pregnant with me.  By the time I was born, all living parents (my grandparents) had passed away.

All of this sounds as though the odds were stacked against her for motherhood.  You would think that my mom would speak of the early days as trying.  Of course each of those events were incredibly difficult but those are just a part of the story of her life.

Ask my mom about motherhood and she won’t mention the above.  Not because she is private about it but rather because those experiences don’t define her. She’ll talk about the immense joy it brought her to be a mother. She’ll speak of the interest with which she would watch us rapidly change as babies.  The love of the little coos and smiles.  The magic of the first steps.

Growing up, it was easy to feel my mom’s love and I now realize how much basking in the joy that we brought her, helped me to feel loved and nourished.  She would spend her days trailblazing at the ranch with me on her back and three little boys running behind her; or copying down the stories that we would dictate to her night after night into a keepsake book; or pulling out her sewing machine and making every wild Halloween costume that we could think of; or constructing huge canopy tents in our bedroom so that we could have a spot for make believe; or reading to us book after book after book on a rainy day; or cooking us wholesome meals straight from the vegetable garden that she would tend to; or attending all of our sports games that we consistently sat the bench at; or marching out times tables around the dining room table; or reading every single one of our English papers before it hit the teacher’s desk; or practicing SAT vocab words with an after school snack; or jumping for joy as we got into top colleges; or hugging us bravely as we made our big move away to college only to head home for a private cry as a new child left the nest; or talking us through and encouraging each of our post college adventures, still far from home; or  standing with open arms and a huge smile as each child moved back to the bay area; or taking a hands on role with our weddings; or celebrating each new grandchild that is born.  These are the facts that she will speak of and these are the experiences that have formed us children into the adults we are.

I recently read another blog that was doing a mother’s day give away and to enter you had to say what you learned from your mom, what immediately popped into my head was to enjoy motherhood.

Now that I have Josie one of my favorite things to do is to call my mom and talk to her about how much I love being a mom and how happy Josie makes me, because my mom gets it.  I can feel her get giddy with me as she listens to what my little one did that day. A huge thank you to my mom for teaching me to love this role as a mother and to have fun with it.  And to my little girl who has brought me a level of happiness and contentment that I never knew before.  May she one day experience the same.

To all the mothers out there Happy Mother’s Day.