This was the first Mother's Day where I had nobody to call. My mom died in February. I'm not one of those people who say she is always with me or I feel her spirit. But you are so right. Don't let anything keep you from connecting with your family.

Thanks for this.

Thank you. ♥

Rated!!! We never know what we've have till it's gone!! :(

this is one of life's greatest lessons

You never miss something until it's gone.
My mother passed over the edge of the sky in 2001.
Yesterday was a toughie.

In the last years of my mother's life I went, once a year, to see her. I spent money to drive from Florida to the Midwest just to do that. And whenever I talked to her on the phone, I always told her I loved her and thanked her for everything she did for me.

Now, I realize that she and my father gave me the warped, isolated personality I have, and crippled me in my ability to relate to other people. But they were doing the best they could, with the limited emotional understanding they had.

Last night, I heard a friend talk with great personal pain about how his own mother supported him physically, feeding and housing him, but didn't give him the affection and understanding he should have received. That's why Mother's Day was not even bittersweet, but bitter for him.

Mothers are human beings, and have human failings. It's one thing to dislike a mother for being deliberately cruel, egotistical and hurtful to her child. It's another thing when she doesn't honestly know any other way to be. That may be the problem with holidays that promote impossible idealistic qualities like "motherhood."

My Mom did the best she could. She couldn't help it that the best she could do was make me a lonely, miserable person. At least she tried, which is more than some mothers do.

My mom always shrieks in horror when I wish her happy mother's day. It seems the remark she was most fond of; "you weren't born, you were hatched from a serpent's egg" must have had a bit of truth in it.

She always was afraid of reptiles :-)

neutron, some people have horrible mothers. We have a neice whose own mother was unable to take care of herself in any healthy way, much less raise her daughter in a loving relationship. Recently, she told us of being forbidden to speak in the morning until she brought her mother coffee and the handful of mind altering medications she took daily. She used to ask herself, "What would it have been like to have a normal mother?"
My own mother tried really hard. She sacrificed for us. I thought of her as warm, but my wife thinks of her as cold and distant. Says something about me, maybe.
Boomer Bob, a friend of my mother-in-law says she had nothing to do with raising her son. "He was just snatched up by the hair of his head."
I couldn't wish a "mommy dearest" mother Happy Mother's Day, but I give my own credit for doing her best.

Well said. Don't let there be regrets.

My Mom's so far gone from AD that her Mother's Day is just another day in the home... I did call call my wife and daughter-in-law...

the lines are hardly down, as u know well. ay!