Everything, Nothing, and I'm a Middle Child

I wandered onto a woman's blog the other day - a woman about my mother's age, with her own gaggle of grown children - and read as she spoke of memories of her children, gardening, the Baha'i Faith and just random moments in life.

Suddenly I found myself feeling all sorts of odd emotions - anger, frustratrion, resentment. I wanted to scream "that's my mother's life!" You know, the one that has been hijacked by cancer. You know, the one we were all enjoying with her. You know, the one we were all taking for granted and didn't know we'd miss so much. Oh, to recapture the feeling that life was simply 'normal'.

I went back to my mother's blog, surfing in different directions and found this gem. In many ways it embodies so much of who my mother is to me.

Now we're in a new place - not completely unrelated to the old place. A bit more tenuous, but then maybe that's just realism that we were all simply ignoring before. My mother's no less alive than she was before - we're just all that much more aware of mortality. Life, life, life. Tricky thing, it is.

[that night I actually dreamt that my mother knew this woman and she threw us all in the car and we drove out to see this woman and her family. when we got there, I thought, "oh! they even know each other!" The woman didn't know we were coming; my mother simply said "I had to get away, so I decided to visit you!" and we all crowded into their house to crash on their living room floor. Huh.]