Mothers: Past, Future and Present

Mother’s Day conjures all kinds of feeling in all varieties of women but for me, I relish it as a chance to think about the Mothers in my life. The ones who came before me and my own dear mother who gave birth to and nurtured me and helped me become who I am. In addition, thinking about the excellence of our next generation who have become stellar, deliberate mothers makes every Mother’s Day a great day!  

I love giving myself a little time to reflect on how much I appreciate my collection of Mothers for what they did or are doing or will do to change the world. I’m especially aware of my fabulous grandmothers this year because of our ancestor night in Bali  I will be spending some time blogging about the amazing things they have taught me, hopefully on Mother’s Day.

Of course the hero of my life is my own Mother who has been gone now for almost 20 years.  She led an astonishing life, some of the details of which I also hope to include on Sunday. And the hope for the future is oozing from our own children and their children. How I love thinking about the Mothers our 13 granddaughters will become. 

Recently I have learned of a new book published by award winning author Fay Klinger called We are Strong. Here Fay talks about the importance of Mothers and Daughters standing together for goodness and righteousness.  Hooray for Fay who tells us through compelling real-life stories from women of all ages how and why we must continue to live and teach life’s important values and the importance of Motherhood to our daughters.

 

The stunning thing about the present for me is the realization that my daughters are now teaching me! I’ve loved watching our youngest daughter, who isn’t married yet, nurture 39 difficult eighth graders with lots of “issues” at a Charter School in Palo Alto. What a lesson in the fact that women can be mothers even when the children aren’t biologically theirs  Through this stretching experience, Charity will have many of  the tools she needs to be a Mother herself ASAP! (First she needs to get married).

In addition our oldest daughter Saren has picked up the parenting baton and run ahead with gusto!. She and her dear friend April Perry have created a wonderful website at powerofmom.com and, as many of you know, have recently released Motherhood Realized, an Inspiring Anthology of the Hardest Job You’ll Ever Love. In April it found its way to #1 in Parenting and #1 in the Motherhood category on Amazon.

 

Of course many of you readers also know our darling Shawni who continues to produce a fabulous blog about her wild and wonderful life as a Mother and is followed by more readers and has influenced more Mothers than we’ll ever know at 71toes.com.

On this special Mother’s Day for the Noah and Kristi Eyre family whose incredible story has been chronicled in the last two posts, I will never forget and always be grateful for being there when courageous Kristi held that little baby hooked up to a hundred tubes and wires for the first time, several days after her birth!  The look on her face was priceless!

Our daughter Saydi, mother of four finds such joy in photography. Of catching the moments that will never come again! How I wish I would have captured more of those fleeting moments when our kids were little. My camera was cheap, old and pretty incompetent! But I’m relishing every moment of what I see of our grandchildren’s lives through the lens of their parents’ wonderfully sophisticated cameras and mostly the lens of their own eyes!  

I could go on to the wonders of every one of our astonishing daughters-in-law, but I’ll leave it there for now.

We can’t be too grateful for our mothers….past, future and present! Happy Mother’s Day!