This is my mom:

Since Mother’s Day is about celebrating moms, I though you all might like to meet the woman who gave me life. She’d had two other children before me, so I’m pretty lucky that my parents didn’t auction me off at birth.*

My mom is a strong woman with a surprising sense of humor and awesome arms (did I mention that she’s a personal trainer?)

I’m a bizarre mixture of relieved, excited, hopeful and happy that my mom is back within an hour’s drive from me. She’s close, I can see her even on a whim and it doesn’t require preplanning and stopping to fill up the tank before I go.

I got a lot of things from my father, but there’s a lot of mom in me. For instance:

• My addiction to affinity for coffee. My father never drank coffee, my mom will happily drink whichever blend of Starbucks we’re brewing when she visits.
• My love of furry, cute things. It’s because of my mom’s desire to keep a puppy from going to the pound that we ended up having a dog growing up. She then adopted a Morris, who is now her companion and in-house entertainment.
• My petite frame. You might have wrongfully assumed from the top picture that I’m taller than my mom. In reality, had we been wearing the same height of heels, she’d have me by 2 inches. But there’s no mistaking that genetics played a large role in my small stature.
• My love of words. Ok so this one is split. My parents were both articulate and intelligent people, but I attribute the creative and unique writing ability that I have to my mother. My mom wrote (and later illustrated) Dust-E Bunny stories for us when we were children. She writes a great deal more, but not in a public manner like I do.

I could never deny that I am my mother’s daughter and I hope that I can exhibit even a fraction of the grace and strength that she does.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the women who give of themselves for their children.

And a very happy Mother’s Day to my mom!

*When my mother was pregnant with me, there was a brief moment when they thought they might be having twins. My mother expressed concern about the difficulty of two babies and my father’s solution was, “We’ll just auction one off.” When my mom shot that option down, his next solution was, “Fine, we’ll just sell one outright.”