Mother's Day

I received this in one of my emails this morning. It will make you cry but is exactly how I feel about my mom and I wanted to share it here.



A few weeks ago I had a dream about my mom. She was at my house, sitting at my dining room table having coffee. She and I were laughing about something- I’m not sure what it was. We were laughing really hard, and every time we’d stop, we’d look at one another and burst out laughing again.

When I woke up, I was in tears. It took me a few minutes to shake the dream away and realize that she wasn’t really there. It was so real!

That dream got me thinking about my mom and how normal it was for her to be all of a sudden sitting in my dining room, even though she’s been gone for almost three years now. It was like nothing had happened- no cancer, no agonizing hours of watching her in pain, no death…she was just back again, and it all seemed so natural.

What if I could have her back? Not forever, but for one single hour? What if by some crazy miracle I was allowed to spend one hour with my mom again? Not a moment of it could be wasted on things that didn’t really matter. What would we do? What would I say? If I had to plan the hour out ahead of time, what would be on my list?

I know the first thing I would do. I’d make a big pot of coffee. My mom loved coffee! Just the smell of it reminds me of her. If I were to have an hour alone with my mom, having coffee together would be the first thing on the list.

I would touch her. Hug her, smell her hair. Hold her hand and press it to my cheek. Bury my face on her shoulder and wrap her tightly in my arms and hang on tight. I would breathe in the scent of her- not that sick hospital smell but the beautiful clean aroma that was my mom.

I would tell her all about my two little girls that she never got a chance to meet. As a matter of fact, I think I would sacrifice part of my sacred one hour meeting just to experience the pleasure of watching her hold them and love them. I know that it hurt her very much to know that as she lay dying, I was carrying two precious lives in me that she would be unable to be a part of.

I would ask her to tell me all the things that she never got a chance to tell me when she was still alive. And to repeat some of things she told me that I either dismissed or ignored because I thought she didn’t know what she was talking about.

I can just picture the two of us sitting at my dining room table having coffee, chatting, laughing, crying and hugging. We wouldn’t really be doing anything all that special, but it would be wonderful.

We would do nothing, together.

I shared this idea with my brothers and sisters, and they pretty much felt the same way I did. If they could have Mom back for just one hour, they wouldn’t really do anything. They would just be with her. One of my brothers said he would take a ride with her to the White Hen Pantry and get himself a Big Gulp and her a cup of coffee. My sister said that she would take a walk with her on the path near her house. Another sister would sit with her around a campfire and talk. None of these things are necessarily special things, they are things that we did all the time while she was alive. We just didn’t realize how special those things were until she was gone.

Have you ever thought about what your children will think of you when they get to be adults? Or what they will remember about you when you’re gone? I do. I think about it a lot. I worry that all they will remember are the times I lost my temper with them or that I made them do so many chores around the house. Or I think that I need to somehow create memories by doing extra special things at Christmas or for their birthdays. Or that I need to spend more quality time with them discussing the really important things in life and preparing them for the future.

My mom spent a lot of time trying to make us all happy. But looking back, she made us the happiest when she wasn’t even trying. One of my fondest memories of my mom is her sleeping on our living room couch one afternoon. I walked into the room and startled her awake. She jumped and then relaxed again and said “Oh, Leah, it’s you,” and smiled a sweet, tired smile. Then she asked me if I would pour her a cup of coffee and fix it just the way she liked it. I did, and when I brought it to her, she was so thankful and we sat there together while she drank it, just the two of us. With six kids in the family, time alone with Mom didn’t happen very often, so that memory sticks with me. There was nothing at all special about that day, we weren’t doing anything, really, but oh, how special it is to me now!

Nothing can be something. It can mean everything. Nothing lasts forever- it really does! My mother’s children cherish the memory of doing nothing with her. And my children may complain that there is nothing to do or that they never get to do anything exciting, but some day they will remember fondly all the days we did nothing together, and they will wish they could do nothing with me again, if only for one hour.