Happy Mother’s Day Mom!

Mother’s day is coming up. This year it will fall on Sunday May 12. It got me to thinking about my own mother, who will be 102 in August 2013 and she is valiantly hanging on to life, such as it is for her now. She is pretty remarkable, to say the least! She taught me everything I know and she did so with all the love she could muster up to give to me.

I was just listening to an internet radio program a few hours ago where they were interviewing Jennie Lake. She talked about her mom in the interview and ever since that time I’ve been thinking about mine. If you are interested, I would recommend that interview because, if for no other reason, I found it really helpful for me to put things into perspective. It has had a wonderful healing effect on me and on our relationship which has troubled me part of the time for years. Here’s a link, if you would like to listen to it: http://tobtr.com/s/4647635 .

I wrote a book of poetry which I published on May 10 last year (Book of Aliases) and that coincidence is a bit startling to me as I now look back on it. I’m an ordinary sort of guy, with very few exceptions. I was a meat cutter for a supermarket chain while my kids were growing up. Later, I pursued my love of food and became a chef. That change took place during some kind of a mid-life crisis I went through in which I also went back to my university and I finished my long abandoned dream of a degree. I’m retired now but that degree led me to teaching English in a University for the last seven years before I hung it all up. Still, this plain old grandpa wrote a book and published it three days before Mother’s Day last year. I’m thinking there is a bit more than coincidence in this!

Am I still trying to get over that feeling of I’m not quite good enough? Good grief, I’m almost 70 years old! I may not have led a very remarkable life but it has been good. When Jennie said that her mom had taught her everything with all the love she had, I nodded and felt the same way. Yeah mom, you did what you did because you believed in it. It may not have worked entirely for you but you believed it with all your heart. Those hard young years as a newly married woman during the depression were your experience. That you got through them is good and the things you learned in those tough days were just the lessons that seemed to fit the times. You shared them with me with all the love you had in you. I can now put those lessons in perspective. I have learned and I am grateful.

So now as I come up on the first anniversary of my book and your 102 birthday, I look at Mother’s day with some new eyes in this old head. It’s a good book but maybe I didn’t believe in it enough. Maybe I’ve kept it hidden like a depression “dime.” Maybe I’ve been greedy and kept it to myself and maybe I even feel a little guilty about that. These feelings are like having gone to a movie I didn’t like and have gotten up and left in the middle of it. So I’m ready now to get up and leave this bad movie of all these bad feeling. I’m ready to say hello mom, happy birthday, here’s my book and Happy Mother’s Day!