A Mother's Gifts to her Children

MY PRECIOUS DAUGHTERS

Amy, Aubrey, Arianne, Me, April, Ashley, Alisa

When you're the mom raising a family you spend your days offering your children many gifts . . . nutritious home-made food . . . a warm, clean and comfortable place to live . . . delicious books to read . . . clean sheets fresh from the clothes-line . . . someone to care when you're sick, discouraged or sad . . . someone to clap when you perform . . . someone to get excited when you make the team, get the grade or find your one and only.

The gifts mothers offer are exquisitely personal - the use of your body for nine months while your child grows big enough to be born, your precious sleep so your child can breastfeed around the clock, your privacy so your child is never without a friend, your sanity so your child can experiment and make mistakes, your patience so your child can try again and again.

We offer all of our self until we think we have lost our self. But in the losing comes the finding and as the years go by suddenly mothers are surrounded by intelligent, talented, accomplished adults who also happen to be our children.

While my family gathered this holiday season, our house was full to over-flowing with all the people I love. To me it was not chaos but beautiful noise, it was not work but an opportunity for the next generation to get to know each other, it was magical really . . . a linking of hearts.

One day, my daughter looked around the room and saw each of her sisters smiling back at her.
"Look, Mom," she said. "all my sisters are here in one room!"
Then she grabbed someone from the kitchen and asked them to snap a picture of me and my girls . . . for she is a mother too now and she knows that moments like these are fleeting and oh so dear.

"Thank you for giving me my sisters," my daughter said as she gave me a hug. Each of her sisters added their own amen.

Brothers and sisters who love you - those were gifts I did not know my children even noticed that I offered them.

They do.