Love As Always

No matter the distraction, I will remember this day. Not as a single day, but a recurring event.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of my mothers passing. Passing is a strange word for it. It gives the impression that it's a mere obstacle to overcome before you are released into the sweet serenity of eternity. If you believe eternity is sweet.

I met some of her old friends. Wise voices with big shoes to fill, that come across as successful and praiseworthy, and oh so alike to my Mother. I hope it's not the size of the footprint that matters, it's how far it's travelled from the last step. Isn't that what makes it courageous.

I'm glad that I'm not part of that world, and that I wasn't raised with set homework times and a curfew and parents who stayed together. I brought myself up with just twelve years of mothering behind me and I feel I'm doing better from it. I enjoyed the juvenile torment of a stepmother. It hardened me and without it I would have no strength at all.

I haven't proved myself yet. I don't have a 'proper job' and I don't plan to get one. I am a dreamer and an escapist and I trust I will always be. There's no better way to go through life than to enjoy it and humour yourself and others along the way.

I think, and it is a confusing thought, a disagreeable one, that sometimes the best thing a mother can do is simply let her child be - unbiased and unchanged by their own beliefs.

I know one thing for sure. I am my own person, and I forever owe that to the absence of the person who would've otherwise shaped me.

I am me. And I've turned out to be the same person as my Mother.

So here is to Wilma Tracey. The mother, the friend, the life and soul. Taken before her time. But never really gone.

Love as always
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