⚡ November 16, 2017
Happy Birthday, Mom 🐔
I will never understand what makes the writing flow and what makes it dry up. Sometimes I just have to let my brain have its stubborn moments of flat silence, but today is not that day. It’s my mother’s birthday, and when she was alive I dreaded this day. Now that she’s no longer here on the earth with me, I wish I could turn back the time machine just to feel a little of that dread again.
My mother died in 2002, fifteen years ago. It seems like yesterday. She was still alive when I wrote a piece for her birthday in my old blog, and today’s top photo looks like it was taken on the same day as the two photos in that piece, based on our clothing. I had to be so careful when I was writing that blog entry in 1999 because I knew she might read it one day. My sisters or brother might have been printing my entries out and showing them to her. It possibly might have made her mad, because most anything would make her mad.
She hated to have her picture taken. She didn’t like attention of any kind. She was miserable, a lot. These pictures, however, don’t show any evidence of that and maybe I was overreacting to her moods, maybe not. She was always disappointed in me for something or other, and so I had to torque up my courage every November 16 and get my voice full of cheer so I could take the verbal beating with some kind of grace and goodwill; with luck, it would be brief. She hated calls on her birthday, she said, but not calling would be even worse.
She had been given a diagnosis of lung cancer by a doctor, but she kept it to herself for ten years at least, until it was way too late. Her own mother lived into her late nineties, and we always thought our mom would live that long too. Today would have been her 90th birthday, and maybe turning 90 would have made her happy. It sure would have made me and my brother and sisters happy. 🐔