A Mothers Day Challenge

I'm a NPR junkie.  I suppose after all the years of resisting, somehow we do all turn into our parents!

Serendipitously about a year ago I happened to listen to "This I Believe". It was about a woman who had suddenly lost her mother and wished she had known her better.  I was so struck by the piece because I too had lost my mother suddenly when I was a child and I have spent the past 25 years wishing I could ask her questions about her life.  

There are many things I can ask my Dad, my Grandfather, or Aunts and Uncles about, but it was the little things I wanted to know - the smaller pieces that when put together make a more complete picture.  I didn't know who she first voted for when she turned 18, what her first impressions were of my father, how she took her coffee (if she even drank it), and where she longed to travel.

So last year I sat down with a pen and began to write down some things about me that might be forgotten over time.  It's wasn't a journal - I absolutely don't have the self discipline for that - but it was a collection of some of my little jigsaw puzzle pieces.  I voted Labour in 1996, thought my husband was far too handsome to be a nice person (thankfully I couldn't have been more wrong), milk with 1 sugar, and I have a hankering to take a trip on the Trans Siberian Railway.  It's a work in progress.

I hope, of course, that I will share a long, healthy and happy life with my treasured children, a life that will be filled with all sorts of questions and answers.  But if for some reason I can't, this little notebook will hopefully help them know me a little better, and answer some of the questions they might have, or provide answers to questions they didn't even know they wanted to ask.

So my challenge is to think about what stories you have that you would like your children to know about you, and to write them down. And if you're really lucky and you still can, ask your mum those questions you've always wanted to, because I also believe that we should truly know our mothers.

Bump Brooklyn