Happy Mother's Day

I got to spend the afternoon with my two kids for Mother's Day...that makes me very happy.

After they took off, I started thinking about my own mom. I can't spend the day with her; she's been gone for almost ten years now. But I still think about her- all the time.

She loved elephants. I'm not sure why. She grew up on a farm in the Midwest; a fondness for cows or pigs (she had a pet pig once named Henrietta) might be more understandable but no, she loved elephants.

She was musical. If you sang a song, she could sit right down and play it through with accompaniment on the piano. She had an amazing ear, yet she always thought she should take lessons so she could "really" play.

She played trombone in a dance band when she was young and learned to play guitar, fiddle, banjo and harp when she was older.

She loved trashy romance novels and had a massive collection of Harlequin romances. She went through a few summers where she read every Barbara Cartland romance she could get her hands on, even as she laughed at them.

She was interested in the nature of reality. She read Edgar Cayce, Jane Roberts' Seth books, all kinds of books on the paranormal. She had a reason; from an early age she saw and spoke with the dead. You don't have to believe me. She did.

My dad was a doubter until she had a conversation with his long-dead grandmother. She told him things about the summer home he'd visited as a child that he hadn't known, things he couldn't confirm until he checked with his aunts.

After that, he listened to her.

She was religious, too, a devout Roman Catholic. But at the end, both her belief in the paranormal and her faith deserted her; she was afraid to die. That broke my heart.

I read a lot of books about theories of the afterlife after she died and one that comforted me suggested that people who'd died traumatically were cocooned in the afterlife; kept in a peaceful sleep in which their "souls" healed from the pain and fear they'd felt, waking only when they were healthy and fearless again.

I hope that's what happened for my mom. I miss her and I've never felt her presence since she's gone. But I believe she's now part of everything around me and with me, my kids and everyone she loved.