When I was born, my parents lived in a two-story brick colonial on Spencer Avenue, in Sharon, Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t perfect, but no house that’s lived in ever is.  Still, to me, it was home.  It was the first home I’d ever known, the place that gave the word “home” meaning for me.

Before my sister came along, we didn’t have central cooling.  So, in the summer when the temperatures rose, dad would sweat it out, while mom and I took the only bedroom with a window unit.  At night, with the cool air blowing, mom and I would lay in bed by lamplight, and she would read to me.  My parents bought me a collection of educational Golden Books, with brightly-colored covers and lots of pictures featuring Disney characters.  It was through those books that I first began learning about the world around me.  But while I enjoyed the pictures, at the time the words on the page remained a mystery to me: incomprehensible symbols that meant little.  I didn’t start to learn about the world by reading; I learned through my mother’s voice.

My mother’s voice sang me to sleep.  Her smile was the first thing I saw each morning.  Hers was the first face I learned to recognize.  When my parents decided to have a second child, my mother took a year on-call, stepping back from her vital work as a nurse to spend time with me.   For that year, we had our own little world together.  She was there every day.  When she left for the hospital, soon to bring my sister into the world, she would call every day.  She’d hidden little gifts for me in various places around the house, and we’d play a little guessing game over the phone until I found one of them.  One of them was a toy car: a Jeep Cherokee with an Indian Chief panted on the roof.

She did all of this in hopes that, when the new baby came along and her attention was necessarily diverted, I wouldn’t feel neglected.  Perhaps she believes now that I don’t remember much, if any, of it.  But I remember every moment, like it was all yesterday.  Those memories are burned into my consciousness, woven into the fabric of my life.  It was that year of my life that gave the word “love” meaning for me.

When I tell others about my mother today, I often focus on her dedication, her tenacity.  I tell them she’s a strong person, one of the strongest I’ve known.  I tell them she never let anyone tell her she couldn’t do something, and never gives up.  But all of that comes from my adult life.  Before all of that, she was the personification of love.  Her voice was the ultimate reassurance, her arms the safest place on Earth.  Long before my mother taught me to never give up, she taught me how to love.  She taught me what love was.

Today is a special day: a day when we honor our mothers, the tireless women who brought us into this world and taught us how to live in it.  This world can be a cruel, uncaring place.  The experiences of some lifetimes could be enough to break us.  But for those of us as fortunate as I have been, we start out with a strong foundation, laid by the women who taught us love.  And when I left to venture out into the world, I did so with a great wellspring of love to share.

I know plenty of mothers today, some I’m privileged to consider friends, one I’m fortunate to consider more.  They are some of the strongest people I have ever known.  Many, especially those caring for small children taking their first, wobbly steps, often fear their task is thankless.  But I can promise that is not the case, because I remember.  I have carried those memories of my mother’s love with me as I navigated the broken shards of this troubled world.  They formed my concept of real, true love, so that when I first encountered it elsewhere, years ago, I knew it when I saw it.

Happy Mother’s Day.  And to all the devoted mothers reading this, one more so than others, thank you. – MK