Remembering My Mother: Happy Birthday

I ran into a Pinterest prompt today that provided a template to answer personal questions about oneself. Question: Write about your mom. What would you like people to know about her?

This post is for my mother…

Today would’ve been her 74th birthday, just two days after my own. I should start with the basics, that she was an immigrant who came to the U.S. not with thoughts of abandoning her home, or the relatives she knew but because she always did what she was supposed to do. She came to the U.S. not for a better life, but because she loved and missed her sister and her sister missed her too. The story gets complicated along the way, but the important thing is that she always tried to do what she was told.

Emotions: My mom had big emotions, big bouts of sadness, sometimes anger and frustration, and fear. Fear of what people would think or say of her children, fear that her parental mistakes would never be forgiven, fear of adventure, but on the other hand she hungered for adventure and newness. And that made her fearless. Fearless in approaching people and places, fearless to ask questions, fearless as to how strangers perceived her, in a way that sometimes seemed and at times seems impossible to me. This is a trait that my brother carries, and I’d like to think that I carry, when it comes to approaching new places at least, and starting over.

I also want people to know that although she had all these fears, and sadness, that this wasn’t all she was. I think she was also one of the bravest people that I will ever come to know, and it’s something that has continued to become more apparent with her passing. She was brave for being able to start over constantly, and taking care of her three children and a husband who didn’t recognize this until it was too late. I want people to know that she made a lonely environment feel safer once you entered the door. That even with all her faults, she had a way of still feeling as though she could make a home truly feel like home even after having grown up.

As a mother and parent, when her children grew up, she tried to always be there. She never rejected or hung up on a phone call, she never turned us away when we asked for help, even if we did those things to her. My father was never the person that any of us called, it was always her and she would come running. She would come running for my sister, even if she’d never be spoken to. She would fly across state lines for my brother, and she would help me load up my dad’s pickup with my belongings after relationships came and went.

I would like people to know that my mother was the one who sang to us and read to us as children, who would sing us our happy birthday’s no matter our age, who would scrape together her pennies in effort to try to make a birthday special. She was the one who would go to the school events and ask us questions about our lives and try to tell us that life would get better, no matter how hopeless it seemed. She was the one who wanted to spend time with us, even if we didn’t always want to spend time with her. I would want people to know that she loved adventure, and learning about new things, people and places and anything beautiful. She loved animals and she always encouraged our love of animals. She loved poetry, and music. She was a dreamer, and always giggled over romance, and flowers. I think of her whenever I see flowers and the hummingbirds and butterflies that cross my path. She is also someone who is continuously missed, because she was and will always be the piece of home that I will always search for. Her fearlessness inspires me to let go of my own fears in hope that I can make my own adventures come true and in some way make her adventures come true as well.

Feliz cumpleaños Mami. I hope you’re now living out those dreams and adventures in an afterlife somewhere.