Happy Mother’s Day 2022

Motherhood is such a gift.

“Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.” Meryl Streep

My personal path to motherhood has been a rocky one – story shorter – two miscarriages, then our son, Brian, then two more miscarriages, then our daughter, Jade, and then we lost our daughter to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 1979.

We are lucky to have a grown, intelligent and caring son who not only loves us as parents, but also seems to genuinely LIKE us as people. Although he lives across the world from us, we are very close. Before he left, he set up a secure chat program and a conference call program. We chat several times a week and we do the conference call thing whenever we’re all awake and functional at the same time. (There is 12 hours difference half the year, 13 hours the rest because of daylight savings time here.)

My sweet sister-in-law wished me a Happy Mother’s Day this morning, sending one of our favorite photos taken some years ago when Brian was visiting a zoo in China, I think.

When we married, I hoped that we would have a large family. In my head I figured 5 kids would be a good number. That wasn’t in the cards, but we ended up with a close family, nonetheless – so lucky to be on the same planet as the son we both admire and love.

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.” ~ Sophia Loren

Happy Mother’s Day to all those lucky enough to have children and grandchildren – the greatest gifts in the world.