A Mother's Love

Happy Mother’s Day!

I’m feeling rather mixed-up today, and haven’t been quite able to pinpoint my emotions.  The first Mother’s Day without Anna.  Another first – difficult, yes, but not a whole lot more difficult than every other day.  Oh how I wish she had been here, smiling at the breakfast table with her brothers as I opened each of their cards and treasures.  But every meal I wish I were setting a place for her. 

I just feel unsettled, not as cheerful as I wish I would be, not as depressed as I think I could be, just a bit more numb today perhaps.

It was five years ago, on Mother’s Day, that we shared the news with our families that we were expecting a baby.  There wasn’t much doubt how I felt that day!  Some surprise, yes, as Isaiah was still a few months away from his first birthday, but so thankful for my two boys and excited that they would have, as it turned out, a sister later that year. 

Other than that, I cannot recall many specific memories of Mother’s Days past, but in the time that I have had children I really haven’t felt that the day is about me; it’s about THEM, and how blessed I have been to be granted by God the gift of my children. 

In the years before that, my growing up years and the years before I was a mom myself, I know I felt thankful on Mother’s Day for my mom and all she had done for me and my seven siblings.  Since becoming a mom myself, my appreciation for her has been multiplied.  I look back and now realize how she must have ached when her children were hurting, how proud she must have been at their accomplishments, how she probably worried when she thought something was going on in one of her children’s lives that she couldn’t quite figure out.  I imagine that she wondered how she would ever make it through something happening to one of her children, and I know she prayed that each of us would find happiness and most importantly continue in the faith we were raised in.  (And I know these things she still does, and now does for her grandchildren as well!) There were times when I would have said that my mom and I are very different from one another, but I realize more all the time how much we have in common, and how proud I am to be like her in many ways.   I thank God for blessing me with my Mom!!

However else I feel today, I am so very grateful to remember and appreciate my mom, and to consider with absolute joy and gratitude my calling as a mother.  I am the mom of three children, watching with incredible awe as Luke and Isaiah grow, and forever grateful that during the four years that Anna was on this earth that I was the one given the privilege of being her mom!!!

I do joyfully celebrate with those who are celebrating Mother’s Day for the first time or with a new baby, including the moms to these two:

My niece, "Baby Amelia" as Anna called her. 

 

and my brand new nephew, Baby David.

Happy Mother’s Day to my sisters and sisters-in-law, my mother-in-law, my grandmother, and all my friends and family who turn their heads at the call of “Mommy!”