She is always with me

Anyone who knows my mother or I knows that we alone share a special kinship that is unspoken and mysterious. We can be together thinking separate thoughts or be apart thinking the same thoughts. A fortune teller once told me that my mother and I were both "old souls" that had been together in a lifetime before. It would definitely explain a lot. For the first 12 years of my life I was attached to her leg. I hid behind her leg, I tugged on her leg, and I think even once in a rage of anger I whipped down her tube top past her mid-legs to hide my own embarrassment and bare her chest to her entire extended family.
I don't think I understood what was going on inside my puny brain (and largely crimped hair - that's me on the left) then and sometimes I struggle with why I did stupid things. Stupid things that hurt my mother.

That's Willow's mother on the left as a teenager and Willow's grandmother and mother on the right in England.

My mother spent her formative years trying to meet and build a relationship with her father. First, traveling across an ocean to meet him in a foreign country. Shortly after this meeting, it would soon be their last meeting. My grandfather decided to take up with a shorter and squatter woman than my grandmother and further bear two more daughters with her. So, off they trekked from Somerset, England to Pennsylvania and now they would make the jump to Thunder Bay, Ontario and spend many years with my great aunt, Joyce, my grandmother's sister. Auntie Joyce was a sweet woman, but she married the cruelest thing to ever walk this planet. He was so mean to all who came near him. There under his roof my mother would bear witness to the abuse he would subject to my great aunt and others. She doesn't speak of the specifics and I don't want to know the grim details. But my mother was a child and she had to see and hear things no child deserves to see or hear, EVER. There would be many homes for her with many strangers co-habitating under the same roof. Strangers who would provide "care" for her while my grandmother was working to support her growing family (there would be 7 kids all together and 2 more would land on the doorstep later on).That's my mom with her little brother Ed

Further to her Thunder Bay formative years, she would develop her girly figure there and develop friendships that she cherishes still. I can't say that I have the friendships from Grade 8 that she has. I'm sure her girlfriends knew then what I know now. My mother makes a great BFF. She is my BFF after all. So then they would move to an even smaller railroad town in Northern Ontario. My mom had her teenage years there and while she went off to college and later a career developed for her with Bell Telephone as an operator, she came back to this same little town what would become my birthplace. She knew my dad for the four years she spent in the same high school, the only high school. They weren't high school sweethearts as their hearts belonged to others then. But they both knew that they were meant to be, or something terribly romantic like that. Her motherhood was split between my brother and I, sometimes. And sometimes she had to split that motherhood with the family grocery store, doing our homework there. Both my brother and I presented her with all sorts of different challenges. I don't know who we thought (or think) we were fooling. Mothers do have eyes in the back of their heads (Yes *Mila* we really do! So you can stop asking me if I have them. They're there, you just need your own in order to see mine).

Mom, you put up with a lot and I'm sorry for the heart aches and tears I caused you. I loved you then like I love you now. My personality was too strong to be bottled up and I needed to exert myself and I just didn't know how. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there. Thanks to the polluters of the world I'll be coming out. We are tethered at the waist to our children when they are young. Mom, I kept you up at night when I was a teenager and I'm sure that *Mila* will do the same to me when she has her turn. Mom, when I married and became a mother, I started to feel one iota of what you felt. It was amazing that being a mom changed me. I didn't think it would. There I was wearing a short skirt writing on my new chalkboard thinking to myself "maybe I'll be a ballerina AND marry a prince when I grow up". I can't believe that *Steve* and I uttered the words "But we don't go to the bar anymore and we love staying home. How will having a kid change things?" And then I went back to enjoying a leisurely coffee with my gay smoking friends while I worried about the calories in that bagel. That was what worried me then. Now, I worry about how many calories I can stuff into a four-year-old's body before 7 p.m. each day. Suddenly I was tethered at the heart like you are to me. It's an inexplicable bond that we have and I don't expect my words to come out here and make you gush with emotion. You have believed in me and persevered with me when you probably should have thrown your hands up in the air. You took the time to make sure that I would be here to be a mother. "It's no accident that" my brother and I turned out the way we did. Mom, Happy Mother's Day and thank you.

You are a great mother and friend to me and you make the best grandmother too. I'm not surprised one bit.

signed, the willow