mother's day

One of the things I've loved most about this stage of life I'm living is the deepening love and admiration I've come to have, in a new and greater way, for my mom. There are a lot of parallels between my life now and her's when I was young. I was her first born, her Madeline. She was supporting a husband in Medical School early in her marriage, I'm doing the same, but Dental School. I've really come to love not only my mom and who she is now, but who she was then. I think about my young mother often. What would she have done in the situations I find myself in? How did she get through another day of tantrums? Or I think about how she did it. She made it through having a baby, and having two, and three, and four... (I'm not thinking about the possibility of nine). Thinking about that gives me hope that maybe, just maybe (with a lot of phone calls to my mom) I can do this.

She has truly been a wonderful light and example in my life. Sometimes I wish I could go back to high school, slap myself in the face and say, "YOU HAVE AN AWESOME MOM! STOP YELLING AT HER ALL THE TIME!" I think back to a road trip, just the two of us, driving to Provo, Utah where she'd drop me off for college. How for the first time I realized how great I'd had it. I realized how much I was going to miss her. How blessed I've been to have such a wonderful mother. Now I want to slap my siblings in the face and tell them to start listening, because being a mom is hard and I can only imagine how much harder it is when there are teenagers involved. 

So here's to my mother. My kind and gentle, selfless mother. Here's to my amazing mother-in-law and the life she's living as well. Here's to my sisters-in-law, friends, aunts and grandmothers. Here's to Madeline for making me a mom, for teaching me and stretching me to growth I couldn't previously imagine. Here's to the future women and mother's I hope to be paving a righteous path for. Here's to the generations of women that have gone before me who I know are helping me on. If anything mother's day makes me want to be better. I'm so grateful for a day to relax but now I'm feeling ready to come back better.

How grateful I am to my Heavenly Father for ordaining families as the central unit of society. For calling women to be mothers. For giving us a purpose and so many unique characteristics that make us women. I love being a woman, a wife, a mother, a sister, a niece, a granddaughter, a friend. I am a daughter of God. There are few things in life that ring more true to my soul. Happy Mother's Day.