On Monday, I gave a presentation at my dad’s computer club. I was chatting before it started with one of the women in the room and I couldn’t say how it came up, but she said to me, “We knew your mom. She was wonderful.” I had a fleeting moment where I thought I might burst into tears on the spot, but I swallowed them back and agreed, “Yes, she was.”
Today would have been her 73rd birthday. I wore a necklace that we bought together in St. Thomas on some one of our family trips — I think maybe a vacation as the year changed from 2000 to 2001 — and a pair of earrings that belonged to her, and all day long I’ve been thinking of her.
I know it’s okay that she’s gone — she would have been five years farther into her Alzheimer’s diagnosis if the pancreatic cancer hadn’t taken her and she wouldn’t have liked that at all — but I miss her. She loved Christmas and the holidays. She would have been baking up a storm, buying presents, and decorating like mad already and my wishy-washiness about where I was going to be for the next month would be driving her crazy.
But I made Christmas cookies with my niece today — sugar cookies, the roll-out kind — and my mom would have liked that a lot. It wasn’t deliberate. I didn’t think, “hmm, what can I do on my mom’s birthday that would please her if she knew about it?” and then decide to bake cookies with my niece. But if I had tried to do something that would please her, I probably couldn’t have picked anything better. And there’s something truly satisfying about that.
Happy birthday, Mom.
Were the cookies delicious? Nice that you got to bake cookies with your niece and in doing that honor your mom. My mom and I thought about my dad while we were eating Thanksgiving at Cracker Barrel. He could always do that golf tee in a triangle game. He could get down to 1 tee. Me and mom can’t get to less than 2.
The food was good but maybe not as good as your sugar cookies!
I couldn’t eat the cookies! They’re my favorites, the ones I made every year from when I was 11 or 12 or so, but I don’t eat gluten any more. They looked pretty, though!
<3