Mother’s Day

My mother, and her mother, taught me many things.  How to read.  How to put others before myself.  How to knit and crochet and paint ceramics and hook rugs.  How to cook gumbo and fry oysters.  How to make that ear-piercing alarm noise that somehow stops a misbehaving child in his tracks. That love and respect for others is more important than slavish devotion to dogma (an awesome lesson to get out of the Bible Belt, looking back). To keep digging for answers and solutions when faced with a problem.  That a home is always a work in progress, not a finished showpiece. The mothers of my ancestry gave me life, each giving birth to the next, as I then gave birth to my own children.  Each mother handed down a piece of herself, bits of her knowledge and heart to be passed on.  I am grateful and proud to be part of that lineage of motherhood.

I always wanted to be a mother.  It was always there, on top of my other dreams and thoughts about the future.  I’m glad I got what I wanted.  It may not look like what I expected, but life never does.  My path through motherhood presented me with lots of challenges, lots of opportunities to grow, and put not just one or two but SIX people under my care, six little persons that came as my responsibility to teach and help grow.  Sometimes I still can’t quite believe that.  I said once, before the triplets were born, that I would probably be watching them graduate from college and still be saying, “I can’t believe I’m a mother.”  Boy, was that ever accurate!  I’m so glad that my children chose me, that they believed in me enough to choose me for their mother.