Grateful Week: Tuesday

Originally uploaded by soularchitect

Holidays are supposed to be a happy time of year, but for those who have lost someone close, that feeling of loss can be magnified by the holiday season. The days are filled with memories of past holidays with the loved one, and that strange, new emptiness of not having them around anymore. This year marks our fifth Christmas without my mother, the finest matriarch, the funniest, silliest, sweetest woman you could ever meet, who adopted all my friends as her own children and made sure our shoelaces were always tied and our bellies fullfullfull. She had a laugh that sounded like she was hyperventilating. She'd raise her chin in the air and close her eyes and make this silly face, sometimes with one arm raised up and dancing in circles around the kitchen. To me, she simply WAS Christmas.

Despite the fact that my mother's laugh does not decorate my Christmases anymore, and I don't get to hug her on Christmas morning as she puts icing on the cinnamon rolls when they come out of the oven (now I am pulling them out of my own oven).. well, despite all that, I am intensely grateful. I had my mother for twenty-nine glorious Christmases, for close to twenty-nine glorious years I got to call this wonderful woman "Mummie"! I was really and truly blessed.

She saw me through rough patches in my childhood, including my parents' divorce when I was just barely school age. She nursed me back to health with her love whenever I got the sniffles or the flu. She threw a party for me when I had my First Communion; ditto when I turned 10. She endured slumber parties with screaming girls, my begging to stay up late, and years of music videos and strange, loud tunes coming from my room. She stirred my before-bed chocolate milk and solved all my problems with ice cream. She made a mean spaghetti sauce unlike any other. She took me to see Pretty in Pink and she mended my clothes, which were always somehow getting destroyed. She indulged me whenever I came home with another pet, or when I begged to let me keep the runt of our cat's litter, a long-haired Maine Coon we called Woodrow. She let me stay home from school the day after he was hit by a car, while our neighbor took him away and buried him for us.

I love my Mummie, and that alone keeps her alive, for which I am so very, very grateful.