Today is national daughters day and as I sit here and play with my daughter I’m hit by the gravity that I no longer have a mother. One of the hardest parts of losing my mom is realizing I have to raise a daughter without my own mother around. As women we go through so many stages with our mothers. Babies being fully dependent on them, childhood thinking they hang the moon, middle school and high school needing them still desperately but hating it, college forging out on our own trying to run as far away from them as possible, to our early twenties when we slowly start to understand them. Getting married having our own families, our own babies, that’s when we can fully appreciate our mothers. We can finally see and love them for all the wisdom and sacrifices they made for us. All the time they spent pouring in to us to raise us to be decent humans. For the first time I feel like I finally saw my mom and she saw me and we were a team. And she was taken away from me just as we hit our stride. Truly we have been a team since the beginning, but as kids often do, it took me time to appreciate all that she brought to the table. Now I find myself pinning away for her wisdom, her shoulder, her stories, her advice every day. As I look at my daughter I have so many questions. Did I act like this as a child? Did you cry when I went to Preschool? What did you tell me when Grandma died? So many situations pop up every day that I wish I could come to her for. So many things that only she would get. The shorthand that develops between a mother and a daughter over almost 4 decades is one that can’t be replicated. No one else knows all my stories without me telling them. No one else has been a witness to my life from the beginning. I miss having her here for many reasons but the biggest of all is I miss being her daughter.
The Chandler Crew 