Mom

My Mom refers to our family as "pleasantly disfunctional". She's right but then Moms are always right. It took my a long time to figure that out. Well, they may not always be right but they will always be Mom and for the most part want only the best for their kids.

Now most everyone says their Mom is special but mine really is. I mean people who aren't even related call her "mom". But she's mine and it wasn't easy for her.

I was born one Friday (that's right "full of woe") afternoon at precisely 2 PM to this unmarried, nineteen year old daughter of the local minister... and it was 1940, a time when people looked at things like that a little differently then they do now. I wasn't aborted or farmed out but taken into the family and loved. Mom worked when very few women did. After several stepfathers, the last of whom was the love of my Mothers life and whose surname I bear, she entered widowhood and, with her unconquerable spirit, continues to have her hair and nails done each week.

She lives comfortably in a beautiful neighborhood close by St. Petersburg Beach, Florida where she regularly entertains houseguests from as far away a Scotland. Each summer she makes a trip to visit friends in Nova Scotia where she is the past Grand Representative for the Order of Eastern Star from Florida (a honor now held by my brother in law, Al). She has been active in the Order for years and is still requested to play the organ (she also Past Grand Organist in Florida) at many meetings drawing from the repertory of marches she's written.

At 85 (she doesn't mind me telling) her balance, due to a childhood inner ear accident, is not so good and she has to watch it so she doesn't fall. She voluntarily handed over the keys to her car a year or so ago and her family and many friends provide transportation and a steadying hand when needed. She has other ailments but when I ask her how she is the answer is always a cheerful "just fine". The one catastrophe that was worse than the time she fell and injured her shoulder was the time on a trip she was caught in the rain with no hairdresser available. She always says she has nothing to do and in the next breath accounts her hair, nail, meeting, doctors, and family and friend appointments she's scheduled for the next week and oh, yes she just got back from the Caribbean cruise and then there was the recent week in Jacksonville.

She hands out advice and assistance, solicited or not, with nothing but love as the motive. She has been, and I hope will be for many years, (her side of the family are notoriously long of life) the best of Moms to myself and Wanda and to my two sisters, Mary Ellen and Joni and their families.

So to you with love , Mom and all the wonderful Mothers and adopted Mothers, a very happy and blessed Mother Day.