May 13th, 2018

This is a card that I gave my mother when I was in primary school. I must have been no older than ten, so she had kept it for over forty years. For me, it's a touching example of how much our mothers care. They worry about how we are sleeping. They worry about how we are doing at school and work. They want us to be happy in our life and support us the best they possibly can.

But mothers cannot be all the things we want them to be. They can’t give us all the things we’d like them to. There are excellent reasons for this and I believe they all add up to mothers being people doing their best with the skills life has equipped them. The benefit of that is mothers have to leave room for us to find our own way.

We have their support and encouragement as we tread our own special life path that is different from hers. Each of us has a brilliant mind, creative and unique so each of us will have a life that is unique. So our mother can’t completely prepare us for a life that is very different from hers. Neither should she.

My mother wasn’t a romance author like I have become. Each of us are here to create our own life. Our mother nurtures us until we are able to take the training wheels off and head down roads of our own choosing. Whatever kind of mother we had, whether she held our hand for a long time or a short time, she was there at the beginning and she was the right one for us. Our life is what it is because she began it all and taught us what she could. Even if those lessons weren’t pleasant they were a gift of experience that we now have knowledge of.
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Mothers do so much behind the scenes in our lives. Their silent hopes or prayers for us continue long after we’ve grown up. When I’m writing I often think about the relationship my heroine has or had with her mother and what gifts it bestowed on her. Especially on Mother’s Day, I’ll be thinking of my mum. Watching me from spirit, I know she’ll be happy that I’m enjoying dinner with my grown up children.

She wasn’t perfect and I certainly wasn’t either, but since she passed I’ve never been more aware of how much I KNOW she gave me in kindness, caring, disciple, listening and giving advice. And I know I used what she gave me when it came to mothering my children. On a day that is full of pink roses and advertisements for expensive presents, I want to focus on my mother’s achievements and my own. Having my children come and visit me is present enough.