If your mother is still alive today, cherish her. If you are mad at her, forgive her. If her quirks annoy you, shake it off. If your mother is breathing today, seize the opportunity to hear her breathe in person or on the phone. If you have the gift of still having a living mother, don’t waste a moment of your shared life together. Don’t text your mom to say Happy Mother’s Day. Let her hear your voice.
If you mother is this side of heaven on Mother’s day you are blessed. If, like me, you have lost your mother you feel the amplification of her loss this Mother’s Day.
In an instant you could join the motherless. I often wish for just a moment more. I dream of finding that one wasted opportunity to relive it a different way. When I was a foolish teenager and fought with my mother she used to tell me that we couldn’t chose our family, but that we loved each other anyway. We choose friends, but God chooses our family for us.
I can only hope that my motherhood honors all that my mom poured into my life. I live with an empty place beside me. Nothing and no one can ever fill that place again. On her deathbed my mother told me that you never stop missing your mother. I wish she had not been so right. Sometimes the pain of missing my mother is so big it feels like it may gobble me whole and other times it is simply an ever present ache.
As the only daughter, I alone carry on my grandmother’s and mother’s legacy of motherhood right now. My family never had three generations of mothers living at once, only two. Now there is only one, me, because my daughters do not have children of their own yet.
If you are blessed with a living, breathing mother today, do not settle for a text message, card or email. Pick up the phone or visit her. Life is extraordinarily short. I never would have imagined I’d spend the majority of my forties without my mother. I had three weeks to prepare to say goodbye – shorter than some people get and longer than others. You simply don’t know – so live each day as if each moment is the last one together.
Seize this Mother’s Day by cherishing your mom. Spoil her with words of admiration. Lavish her with your time. Indulge her with remembrances. Forgive her humanness. Love her extravagantly.
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