Mom lessons on love

This blog is specifically for the mom’s out there but I hope it holds something for everyone…

This is the first year I don’t have a mother to love on.  After my mom passed in 2012, I doubled down on my focus on my mother-in-law, Eileen.

This is our first Mother’s Day without her.  

Eileen wasn’t a substitute for my mom.  Eileen and I had always had our own relationship that was part mom-daughter, part friend, part something I can’t quite explain.  But after my mom died she filled a gap I didn’t even know I needed filling.

Eileen was a no-nonsense person who didn’t mince words.  If she said something she meant it.  So after my mom died when she told me “Your mom would be so proud of you” she wasn’t just saying it.

I felt it at my core.  And she always managed to say it right when I when I needed to hear it. 

Mother’s Day was a day she and I shared a secret language.  I’d hunt the greeting card stores for a card that said exactly what I needed it to say.  A card just from me.  Then when we talked she’d tell me how much the card had meant and that she felt the same way.

It was messages about how lucky I felt that I got to be part of her family.  How she was uniquely special to me and “mother-in-law” was a term that didn’t really apply to her.

She has an amazingly wonderful daughter (my sister-in-law) so I wasn’t filling a “daughter” gap – it was something else.  The same was true for me.  She wasn’t filling a mom gap – I had a fabulous one – she simply added to my life in a way that was important.

She taught me things about being a mother by the way she showed up for her kids, for her grandkids, for me.  She augmented things I had learned watching my own mom and also showed me completely different ways to approach “mom challenges.”

Mother’s Day gave me a chance to tell her that.

Eileen passed in October.  In the weeks leading up to her death, while she was in hospice, she gave me one final “mom lesson.”  It wasn’t even directed at me, but it was the most important lesson I learned from her, so I want to share it with you.

She was sitting with my sister-in-law and told her “I want to write letters to you and your brothers to tell you how much I love you.”  My sister-in-law laughed and told her “What do we need those for?! …” and proceeded to share all the ways Eileen had shown her love over the years.  

Eileen had planted her love deep inside her children with thousands of big and small actions.

In my book, Make Space for Magic, I shared that my mom’s biggest regret when she was dying was that she had not written her “Book of Love” – the story of how much she loved my brother, sister, and I.

The fact that Eileen held that same concern helped me understand that when I get to the end of my life, this will be what I want to know.  Did my kids know how much I loved them?  

Life can feel so overwhelming.  When you are a mom, that fear that your kids may be losing out on something adds to the stress in ways you don’t always see. It did for me. It is, in part, what I was healing during this sabbatical – the feeling that I’m not enough for my kids.

Now when that “not enough” feeling comes up around my kids, I focus on the last thing I did for them out of love.  It reminds me I can’t control outcomes but I can give love in abundance. 

If you are a mom here is a gift I hope you to give to yourself today, on Mother’s Day:

Honor every single thing you have done for your kids because you love them.  Whether they have the ability to tell you it right now or not, they feel that love.  Whether what you did turned out the way you wanted it to is irrelevant.  That love transmits in big and little ways every day.

Happy Mother’s Day,

Patty