Happy Birthday Mom!

So, today would have been my mom’s 60th birthday. Wow, how time flies. She was 53 when she died of Breast Cancer. Today at lunch I was watching a rugby game at the Czech sports bar where we had lunch. The referees were wearing pink uniforms with Breast Cancer Awareness messages on them. I thought that was very interesting.

When my mom died, the first thing I did was wonder if I had made her proud of me. My father reassured me that she was. That was enough to comfort me at the time. A week or so ago, I was going through an old box of letters. I found one she wrote me while I was away at college. I remembered receiving it, and then being board with it, and I never read the whole thing. Well, I read the whole thing last week. The whole letter basically her wondering if I was proud of HER!

No matter how sad it is, I must admit that at the time I didn’t appreciate her, and I wasn’t all that keen on spending time with her. Now, all I have to say is that I am SO proud of her! There are so many things that I appreciate now and qualities that she had that I didn’t understand, and now I covet these qualities. None of them have to do with mothering, but just the things she valued, the way she treated people, who she spent time with, the things she was good at….I want to be them all. I think she would be proud of that too.