Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take. Cardinal Mermillod

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and for a lot of families, this will be a very different Mother’s Day than they are used to. A pot of flowers left on the front step after not seeing our Mother for weeks is better than nothing. A phone call may have to suffice instead of a hug and a lovely breakfast, brunch, or dinner.

Maybe someone has set up a Zoom call where everyone in the family can participate. That is a lovely idea and if Mom had a computer and internet I’d try and set one up. Some people may do a drive-by parade.

A community group has made quilts and is giving one to every mother in a nursing home. What a lovely idea.

Mother’s Day with Mom is always a phone call so for me there is no change. Maybe during this difficult time, we are making an effort to make people we can’t see feel more loved. Could some people feel more loved and less taken for granted now, than they did before because we are making more of an effort?

“My children are my life,” my mother once said. She was in a difficult situation widowed with two children and a brand new baby.

My Mother: She is beautiful, softened at the edges, and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her. Jodi Picoult

Isn’t that the true statement of motherhood? “Our children are our life.” It is why when the worst happens and parents lose a child we feel a pain in our heart. They are going through what we can’t imagine we could get through.

We are connected to our Mothers with a connection we cannot have with any other. If we are lucky it is a strong, deep connection for a very long time. If all they gave us is life, it is a gift we could get no other way

Many people wish and long for the kind of Mother I am blessed to have. Looking back on my childhood it seems idyllic, like a Rockwell painting. When we grow up feeling truly loved we are blessed. We have been given a foundation to build our life on that is strong.

Nothing about Mom’s life has been easy but I think it has been a very good life. She did the best she could with the circumstances as they presented. When we face hard times the choices we make will make things better or worse. If we start making bad choices our lives can slip from bad to worse and from temporary setbacks, to situations we may never recover from. When we are resilient we recover from hard times with grace stronger than before. Mom’s generation faced many hardships they overcame with guts and determination, they built strong families and they never expected life to be easy. If there is a generation that can say they lived through the best of times and the worst of times I think it would be theirs.

It is lovely to see older women with their children and grandchildren. There is a warmth that is palpable coming from them as they interact with sons, daughters, granddaughters, and grandsons. We don’t have to ask if they came from a loving home, it is evident. I don’t mean perfect. What is a perfect mother or a perfect parent?

Our Mother did the best they could, with what they had, most of the time. They gave us the strength to go forward and build our lives. They gave us the courage to create our own families and bring forth another generation. The torch has been handed to us and it is our turn to be the example of what a mother should be and what a grandmother should be. We are the matriarch in our families.

Our Mothers taught us how to love. No matter where we are in our lives our Mother remains important to us. We never outgrow the desire to be loved and it is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments.

If we are lucky enough to have our mother in our life we are blessed. If we can call her, hug her, or connect with her in some way we feel loved. Our mothers provided the foundation of our life, it is up to us to build something great on it and provide the foundation for the next generation. Have a Happy Mother’s Day.

The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation. James E. Faust

Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything. Unknown

Mother: the most beautiful word on the lips of mankind. Kahil Gibran

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Love You Forever by [Robert Munsch, Sheila McGraw]

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Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you. Mother Theresa

Love is a verb I tell myself this morning as I stretch in bed, it is a delicious Saturday. I don’t have to get up so early. I spend a few more minutes in my comfy cozy bed.

When I come downstairs my husband has already made coffee. “Our kettle has a problem”, he says. I noticed it yesterday; I think it just boiled its last pot of coffee. It worked until it doesn’t work any longer. When things like this happen, would we rather have a warning or have it good till its gone?

Is this a metaphor for life? Coffee pots, cars, furniture, plants, pets, friends, children, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Everything in our life is here for a time; we are here for a time.

Were we good and faithful like my coffee pot? Were we like a TV we had where when we called in a repair man he took a hammer and said as he knocked against the TV, “trust me this is diagnostic.” We could have used the hammer ourselves, although he knew where to place the blows and we didn’t. That makes all the difference. In the end he couldn’t fix it, but we could still watch TV, although we couldn’t watch good TV.

I found a quote by Jessamyn West. It is the loving women not the loved who feels loving. I believe love is a choice, a verb, an action. If we can feel loved by loving instead of by being loved then we are in control. We can engineer our life to fill the holes our self. This is a great epiphany for me. We are more in control of our lives than we think we are. Many women are looking for someone to love them; instead we should be looking for places to put our love.

We can make the choice to love. This can be challenging with children, parents, husbands, wives, and friends at times. I’ve often looked at people who are caretakers of people who don’t appear to be able to give anything back. Perhaps the people who look after them understands the gift of being loving gives you back the gift of feeling loving.

We like ourselves more when we are loving. So many people feel they don’t have enough love in their life. Are we searching for the right thing? Instead of searching for someone to love us, do we need to search for ways to be loving? Romantic love may be the trap here. We expect too much from romantic love and not enough from the rest of our life. People love belonging to big, messy, loud, rambunctious families. There is all this love being shared. Instead of feeling there isn’t enough to give to everyone there is love multiplied and a feeling of belonging.

We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. Mother Theresa

If love is a verb and it makes sense to me it is. It isn’t something we get, find, fall into, it’s something we do. We don’t need to be waiting for love. We need to be spreading love everywhere like thick butter on our toast. Slathering love all over the place. When we find the happy people they are often the most giving, generous, open, loving. There is always room at their table for one more. They have time to sit and talk. They have a kind word, a ready smile, encouragement. We like to be around them. They seem comfortable in their own skin.

Sometimes when my husband and I are having people over the guest list keeps expanding as he keeps thinking of more people to invite. I sometimes get upset, why the last minute invites, worrying there won’t be enough food. I need to relax and let him spread the love by including more people. There is always enough food, there is usually too much. I need to relax and enjoy sharing the warmth of hearth and home.

Life is a little messier if you are adding a plate to your nicely laid table. The optics might not be as good, but the fun, joy and togetherness makes up for it. Worrying about the little things can make us miss out on some of the things we wish we’d relaxed and enjoyed more.

I’m going to work on this. I’ll find a way to be more loving, open, accepting, relaxed, and be more willing to set another place at the table.