Happy Mother’s Day weekend 2015!!!

I am giving a speech in the Philadelphia area next week as a survivor of sexual assault so have been all consumed in writing my story and the issues surrounding it. (WILL BE POSTING ABOUT IT ON NEXT WEEK’s BLOG.)  While in the process of writing the speech I recounted again, how fortunate I was to have a supportive family in the aftermath of surviving a brutal rape.  My Mom, particularly, listened without judgment and allowed me to “recover” in my own way and in my own time.  Every survivor should be so fortunate to have a mother like mine who has given so much love, provided me with so much compassion and understanding over the many years.  I think if I can do half as good a job in mothering as she has, I ought to be pretty satisfied.

While thinking about writing this post, I wanted to acknowledge that many people who are reading this may have already lost a Mom or a child to paradise.  I will be thinking of all my St. Jude Soul Sisters who have been to hell and back, enduring holidays every passing year while their sweet angels float above us in heaven. I can only imagine that loss but realize this has to be a very sorrowful weekend for many people….I think society should come up with some accepted way to acknowledge the bad/challenging years for dedicated celebration days and holidays.  I’m not sure anyone can have a celebratory life every single year?  Today I have picked 15 quotes about Mothers and found one by Marcel Proust (Love his “stuff”) that I liked related to grieving the loss of ones mother.  Here it is.  This is the First Quote of Fifteen:

1. “Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer.  Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast in the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power…that has broken you restores you a little, I say for a little, for henceforth you will always always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”-Marcel Proust

My 2014 Mother’s Day weekend was memorable-and not so much in good way. I have a recollection of the majority of my kids desiring my head on a platter for much of the weekend…YIKES, once again, no claims to get a “Mother of the Year” award anytime soon.  The last few Mother’s Day weekends I have gotten to spend in LA.  This year, instead of me being with my own kids, I’m in LA with my sister and my adorable, smart, wonderful Mom.

                                 My Mom-CENTER-Matriarch of the Family…

We will also get to see one of my four children.  It’s my son’s last weekend of college in his Freshman year. Wow, that sure did go fast for me.  I’m not sure he’d say the same thing, given this is his first experience with finals week?  It’s so hard to believe we came to his college campus a year ago as a family  to take a closer look at where he would be attending school.  The visit was a bit tense.  Let’s just say that we exchanged a few unpleasantries in the midst of campus and leave it at that.   Oh the joys of motherhood….That said…I occasionally chant to myself:  “I LOVE MY JOB, I LOVE MY JOB!!!”  BUT,  for sure, even if I don’t always convince myself of that, I’m 100% certain of this:

I LOVE MY KIDS, I LOVE MY KIDS, I LOVE MY KIDS!!!

I dedicate this blog to my Four Children and to my own WONDERFUL, LOVING, SELFLESS, BEAUTIFUL MOM who also had Four children (see siblings and Father pictured below) and whom I admire, respect and LOVE with all my heart and soul!!!

To those of you reading who have Moms or who ARE Moms,  I picked 14 more quotes about Mothers that resonated with me and wanted to share them.  In no certain order here are the other 14:

2. “It’s Pediatrics 1-0-1, Listen to the Mother.” -Dr. Amar Gajjar (Physician at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital)

3. “Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.”-Robert Browning

4. “There’s no perfect way to be a mother and a million ways to be a good one.”-Jill Churchill

5. “A mother’s arms are more comforting than anyone else’s.”-Princess Diana

6. “A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.”-Tenneva Jordan

(Not true for me, however…#piehoarder…inside joke)

7. “It’s not easy being a mother. If it were easy, fathers would do it.”-Dorothy on The Golden Girls

(I LOVED The Golden Girls Show and later became friends with Tony Thomas who produced it-son of Danny Thomas, the Founder of the Beloved St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital)

8. “Kids don’t stay with you if you do it right.  It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.”-Barbara Kingsolver

9. “Mothers and their children are in a category of their own.  There’s no bond so strong in the entire world. No love so instantaneous and forgiving.”-Gail Tsukiyama

10.”My mother…had a very deep inner spirituality that allowed her to rebuild her life.  It’s extraordinary that she had such a strong sense of self and such a commitment to the future and such a strong creative sense that she could build new worlds for herself and us out of total devastation in her life.”-Caroline Kennedy

11.”My mother taught me to be nice to everybody.  And she said something before I left home. She said, ‘I want you to always remember that the person you are in this world is a reflection of the job I did as a mother’.”-Jason Segel

12.”I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.”-Mitch Albom

13.”There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”-Stephan King

(I learned this first hand in the Minneapolis Children’s Hospital ICU the summer of 2009).

14.”God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.”-David C. Gross Dictionary of 1,000 Jewish Proverbs

HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND EVERYONE!!!  I hope all my Mom Friends and Family Members get spoiled ROTTEN!!!