My Mommy

                My mommy, yup sometimes I still call her mommy, she is the reason I am who I am today. I do not even know where to begin saying how much I admire her and love her. When I was a kid I used to think she was the mean one or maybe just the one who did not put up with a whole lot. She is not a dramatic, crazy over the top girly girl and so unwarranted melt downs and fits were not permitted or even acknowledged. If we wanted something or had to ball our eyes out my dad let us be the princesses. He would call us his little lambs and comfort us but probably sometimes to a fault. When I was younger I was a little tiny drama queen and I cried about everything. My mom was so patient with me and helped me and cared for me but she never let me be ridiculous. I was afraid of ants and flies…no lie. I remember clearly that a fly landed on my sandwich once at a picnic and I lost my mind. My mom just brushed it off and told me I was fine. I would say that the intense emotions and passion I have come more from my dad but I know that the strength I have comes from my mother. She is beautiful; strangers tell me how beautiful she is. She was and still is a stay at home mom and yet she never let herself go. She got up every single day and exercised and showered and got dressed and made breakfast. She was never ever lazy. She would do our school with us and clean the house at the same time. she took us to the park, and the museum, and the zoo and all of those fun things. They say hind sight is 20/20 and I do believe that. What I may have thought was sometimes mean was just discipline. She gave me and my sisters and my brother our best chance at life. She instilled values that are still in my life. She was the one who would make us turn off inappropriate movies or who monitored what we read, she was the one that would make us change if our outfits were ridiculous and sometimes I looked at those things like they were suffocating but now I see that she was just making us a benefit to society not monsters. We learned to clean and do laundry and all kinds of things that we would need to know for our adult life. She knew everything about us, what we liked what made us happy and what broke our hearts and she took time to do things to make us happy. I also remember my mom shutting herself in her room and praying and speaking in tongues and that is something priceless. The one thing that she did for me was be an example of complete love and strength. I love the way I love because of how I watcher her love. I was the wife I was because of the wife she was. If I have kids I will be the mother I am because of the mother she was. Without watching her come through her brokenness and come out stronger and without watching her care for and love my dad no matter what the past year of my life would have killed me. I would not know how to love someone who hurts you and I would not know how to pray for people that disappoint you. I would not know how to get up every single day and live my life even when I wanted to give up. Without her I would be more afraid than I am, more insecure than I can be and a lot of other negative things. She is selfless and brave and she is the very definition of love. Because of her I am a real lady. Because of her our family is still together and because of her the world has five amazing humans, no make that six…this includes my dad. Sometimes I am afraid to tell her how scared or broken I really am because I don’t want her to know how disappointed I am in myself and the way my life has gone but its like she knows and she always obliterates those fears and lets me know how amazing I really am. She has never looked on me in judgment whether I am yelling about something that I just said I didn't care about or whether I am crying about something like the wrong kind of ice cream. Just the other day I was texting her and mentioned me losing weight and how I am working so hard for it. She did not tell me not to do that but she just said that some people would kill for my curves. She just wanted me to know that to her I am already beautiful and that other people see it too. That was better than a compliment from anyone else because it was from her heart. I know that she is proud of us even if she doesn't scream it from the roof tops because she shows it in the way she treats us. I have always loved her but I don’t think I have ever valued her like I do now. I have gone through some things that I have watched her go through and I can appreciate all that she did and all of the strength that she portrayed. I know she probably won’t read this blog but I can tell her these things in person or write her a letter. I just hope that the rest of the world can see this and will know what kind of mother I have. I hope that if anyone who knows me or her reads this, that they get a new appreciation for motherhood. If anyone reading this loves me at all and thinks that I am anything then I hope you realize that I am what I am because I had the best kind of mom in the world♥