Dear Josh,

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This Mom thing is hard.  Coming up on 14 years of doing it, it hasn't really gotten any easier.  I'm still totally lost.

I'm not really sure why I get mad so dang easily.  Or why it irritates me that you have the same habits I had when I was 13.  It probably seems like a very long time ago that I was 13, a lifetime, and it was.

My heart feels very tender lately, it seems to have this surging sort of quality.  It worries all day long about what you're doing, how you're thinking, what decisions you're making.  It troubles over the tools I've given you - or the lack accordingly.  I am constantly afraid that I am not enough to keep you safe.  I'm much too lazy and easy-road-taking.  I can only hope to make up for that by loving you beyond the boundaries of common sense.

When you were small, you used to come and tuck into my body, tight against my chest, and I could smell your hair.  It was feather soft and silky fine, golden nut brown.  The chubby red cheeks of your boyhood pressed against my beating heart, I would sit and breathe you in.  I have no words to describe those moments except for sacred.  Sacred is the bond between a mother and her child.  I feel those bonds stretch thin as you grow up and away, stretching your wings.  But they hold.

When I was young, I couldn't really imagine what being a mother meant.  It was a distant, blurry picture of something vague I knew I wanted.  In all my wildest dreaming moments, I could never have imagined it would be like this.  This sorrowing, gleeful, satisfying, stretched-thin joy.  Looking at you, that picture of you I hold in my mind, I know that I have been so blessed for every moment I've been given. 

I hope someday you'll understand and pass this feeling on.  But not for a while.

Love,

Mom

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