Seems Like Forever

Can't believe I haven't posted anything in a while.

I've been dealing with feelings, thoughts and emotions that go from one end of infinity to the other. Which means...too many thoughts and not enough closure on the thoughts.

I've taken on a HUGE scrapbook project. Making 4 scrapbooks for me and my siblings of the diaries that my mom left behind. I have 39 pages of typed notes from the diaries. Then last night I opened a box of poems. Some I had seen, some I had not.

The myriad of emotions that ran through me were pretty foreign as I read words my mother wrote. I guess it was her way of expressing what would not come out.

What and or whom my mother disliked...she hated. It is hard to get my head and heart around the intensiveness of her emotions. She would get angry at one of us...her children and tell the others about what we did that wronged her. Then she'd write it on her calendar diary and write a poem about it.

She never undid the anger. She wouldn't apologize and she didn't think it was wrong to tell each of us how the other acted...and yet many times in her diaries she wrote "I just wish tongues would quit wagging." And she never figured out it was hers.

The next day, she'd write how wonderful the person was that she had hated the day before. It was so confusing to go through all her words and feel the love then the loathing.

And then I found a poem she wrote about me. Weaved within the ink blots and scratches, she wrote about how she depended on me her 2nd child. She loved me, she could lean on me, she would need me and I'd be there. Her last line in the poem was "You are second to none."

I sat there a while, pondering the love in her poem and wished that she could have told me that in person...instead of prose.

It really takes me aback a little knowing that I have the same tendencies. And today I've decided that my children need to know how much I love them by not only my words but my actions. They need to know that I love who they are now and appreciate them so much because of the choices they made on their own back when they were younger.

I wish I could have been a better mother in their youth...but I was just a child myself. I only knew what I had seen in my mother.

I became a Christian in 1984 when they were 10, 8, & 6. So much damage had been done...and unfortunately I didn't change overnight. Yet, my latchkey children made the best of it. And I am so very proud of each of them. They are wonderful individuals and I can only hope that something I did when they were younger was right and gave them an instinct that they will pass on to the next generation.

I remember praying for my children after 1984...almost nightly I would ask God to give them good roots...not roots that grew from me...but roots that would be God-sized. I think God answered my prayer and I stand in awe at my children today. They are blessings to me.