Letting My Mother Know I Love Her
What have I been doing during this “slow” time? Well, no time like the present to take on the challenge of redesigning my website. Having just paid the final bill for my last design, I decided to do this one on my own while attending an online social media conference. Thumper says I’m like a flight attendant who works all day, comes home to kiss her kids goodnight and goes back to work again.
Honestly? I’m a little fed up myself. It isn’t easy being ahead of the curve, and with one more month until school’s out for summer, I wonder whether I can keep up this pace. But I can’t give up now, because someone would be most disappointed in me for not persevering, and that would be me mum.
I hold my mother completely responsible for how far I have come with my writing: always urging me to write, praising me when I hit a high note and sending encouraging messages. It was also my mother who instilled a love of writing and an appreciation for life’s beauty in me at an early age. Growing up, I often received lyrical cards from her, her words as beautiful as the enchanting illustrations on their fronts.
I grew up with the paintings of these artists hanging on the walls of our house in Massachusetts. Every day as I raced down the stairs, I slowed down to enter the fantastic worlds created by Rackham, Doyle and Dulac. Something in these paintings brought fantasy to my mother’s lonely childhood in England, where illustrated books were her only companions.
I live for her poetic descriptions of the changing light on a gray day, diamonds sparkling in the snow and the soft whisper of the trees. Far more prolific than I am, she doesn’t give credit where credit isn’t due, especially when I’m too mainstream or use “common” expressions. She inspires me to reach for higher ground and not to write content merely to bring in more readers.
My mother. I am nothing without her. I can’t watch a film or read a book without calling her first to hear what reviews she’s read. I can’t publish a post without needing her feedback, and whenever something good happens, she’s the one I call immediately, because I know she’s the only person in my life who will match my enthusiasm.
As Mother’s Day comes chugging around the corner, memories of my mother and her singsong voice come tumbling forth. One can’t live in a world of enchantment and still keep both feet completely on the ground, and perhaps that explains her ability to let us be who we were: children, climbing trees, playing in the clay by the creek and building forts in the forest until the dinner bell rang. She was a very tolerant woman, letting us march through the house clashing pans together as we belted out songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar.
She was, and still is, a mother unlike any other, and I feel very fortunate that she is mine. I only hope I can be as wonderful to my children and bring them the magic that will live forever inside me.
