Happy Birthday, Mom

On this day 84 years ago my mother was welcomed into the world, held and loved by her parents and grandparents. She was a baby with all the promise of life ahead of her. I am sure her parents saw in her what I saw in my children when I first held them. What I saw in my grandchildren on their birth days. I never met my grandmother but today I knew that at one moment of this day she held her daughter and was amazed at her perfection, her beauty.

I found myself on the verge of tears today. Not just once or twice, but repeatedly. Small things, little things caused the lump in my throat to swell and my eyes to water. I didn't give in to it, that lump that closes my throat. I forced it down, swallowed it again and again. When I sat beside my mother's bed this evening (she didn't feel like walking all the way to the dayroom) and listened to her tell the same story I realized how short a span of time 84 years really is and just how much life fills those years. How many people and places and times fill in our lives and how we hardly notice its happening until so much of it has passed. How when we are young we look only forward and when we are old we look only back. In the middle we're too busy to look one way or the other.

My daughters and granddaughter, my sister's daughter, son-in-law and grandson visited my mother this weekend. We sat together in the dayroom of the Nursing Home and wished her a Happy Birthday. We talked together and pretended everything was fine, that celebrating a Birthday in a Nursing Home was normal, that forgetting the granddaughter in front of you was born on the same day was okay. That having her ask who she had come with when she has been in the same place for 5 months was not unusual or alarming. Around us other families altered their definition of normal.

I received an email from a friend today. A friend who struggles as I do, as we all do, with life changes and decisions. Her father turned 85 last week and before he greeted his grandchildren she got him ready. I picture her with him, adjusting his shirt, shaving his chin then watching him as the family gathered. Gathered to create another memory.

Many of us don't look too far forward these days. I don't look too far back, either. Perhaps that means I have reached the middle ground. Or maybe I can only comprehend the immediate. Today the immediate is that my mother is with us. 84 years after her arrival in this world she is here and she is greatly loved. There are worse thing than this.