For our mother’s sake:

by Jessica Sacher RN MN IBCLC

Twenty years. Twenty years ago today I said good-bye to my mother for the last time. I was at her bedside when she breathed her last breath that ended three years of a lost battle with cancer. It was yesterday, it was today, and yet twenty years have somehow come and gone. A day does not pass that I don’t think of her. She lived to see two of our three children. One year after losing my mother, we were blessed with our third child.

I have always felt that this daughter was my mother’s last gift to me, her gift of love and hope from heaven. True to form, our daughter, Eyelle, has been a joy to raise and love. Now a college freshman far from home she has become a delightful young woman who, like all of our children, would have made my their grandmother proud.

For those of you who are still lucky enough to have your mother, relish the time with her. Don’t wish that she would go away and stop nagging you. Overlook her faults, criticisms, and human frailties. So what if she doesn’t fold the towels the way you do, or load the dishwasher the way you do? So what if you can’t find where she put the lasagna pan after she made you dinner.

Give her the gift of spending time with you and her grandchild. Let her spoil this baby in the best sense of the word. Let her hold this baby while you take an extra 10 minutes in the tub for yourself. It doesn’t matter if she drives you nuts, or says the wrong things at the wrong time.

Or, if you are lucky, as I was, and your mother is your best friend, tell her and treasure her for today and for this moment, because who really knows what tomorrow will bring.

In memory of my mother, Etty Bernstein