Happy Mother's Day

This weekend, I celebrate my mother, who is one of my dearest friends. 

This is also my first Mother’s Day as a new mom. 

Since becoming a mom, I feel closer to my own mother than ever before.  I finally get it.  I finally understand my mother’s love for us and the choices that she made for our family.

I couldn’t ask for a better role model as a mother.  Throughout my entire life, my mother has always made me feel as though I were the center of her universe.  She was always involved at my school.  She spent countless hours driving me to and from every kind of extracurricular activity you can imagine. 

When we got home from school, she always had a snack waiting for us.  Every day she packed me a lunch, complete with a peppermint patty for dessert.  Once I moved beyond the lunchbox stage, she packed my lunch in a brown paper bag.  Every day, she neatly folded the bag and stapled it together.  Then she would write my name across the front in her pretty, cursive writing. 

I’ll never forget those lunches and the care that she took in preparing them.  Those lunches are symbolic of my childhood and the kind of mother she is…always attentive, deliberate, and loving…always going above and beyond for the sake of her family.

Most importantly, my mother always made me feel important.  She always made time for me no matter how hectic things got.  She was constantly involved in my life in every possible way.  Even during those tough teenage years, she stayed involved and drove me crazy asking me questions.  Even when I tried to push her away, she refused to accept it and held on. 

She also let me be myself….and chose to love me for who I am.  I know I made choices that she didn’t like.  And when I came home crying, after I made some stupid mistake, she always welcomed me with open arms, held me, and tried to make me feel better.

Now that I’m a mother, I look back on some of the times she supported me and I realize her remarkable selflessness.  When I chose to move to Australia to go to graduate school, she let me go.  I realize now that I must have broken her heart…no mother wants her child to live on the other side of the world.  But rather than begging me to stay, she helped pack me up and bravely sent me on my way.  Throughout my entire life, she’s never held me back, choosing instead to always help me grow my own wings. 

I think that is the essence of motherhood.  Mothers spend their days and nights nurturing their children…selflessly devoting their time and attention to their children’s needs.  We tirelessly attend to them with the sole purpose of one day letting them go…hoping and praying that we’ve done enough…taught them enough…and loved them enough along the way.

These days, my mom is my dearest friend.  We talk or email every day.  She is both my sounding board and my compass, always helping me find my way.  As a mother, she has shown me that the greatest gifts I can give my child are my unconditional love and my undivided attention. 

There’s a saying, “you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.”  But truthfully, if I could choose my mother, I would choose her over and over and over again. 

Thank you Mom.  Thank you for being so wonderful.  I love you dearly.