Josie Diels

Wow.  I just looked at my last post and it’s almost a year to the date since I last posted.  My excuse: journey into motherhood.

I’ve really missed writing and music and writing to music.  Time management is more challenging than ever, and it’s always been a challenge.  Then, I freaked out about where to begin, how to begin after all this time, and then I said, just start somewhere.  So here I am. And I’m going to try to post more than once a year.  So, what to say today.  Well, it is Mother’s Day.  On Facebook there was so much about it and I wondered if I had just tuned it out in year’s past.  The best part was seeing throwback pictures of friends’ mothers.  And then, I posted my own.

I was very emotional yesterday and today.  Some Mother’s Days it happens. Some not so much.  But I was crying this morning.  Yesterday too. Yesterday was about my father.  I felt guilty about being a brat and missing him–because he was my mother too once my mother died.  And then this morning, I couldn’t put my figure on her per se but it was about her, him, us, that history, and I felt emotional.  Sad, happy, all at once.  That is the thing about that particular feeling.  It’s about loss but also about where I’m at today.

I also thought today about how goofy we are, Matt and I. Even before Baxter’s arrival.  That fun. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t something my parents had.

But they had something and what got me going yesterday was this memory that popped into my head.

Most Mother’s Days, my dad and I visited the cemetery.  It was one of a handful of days in the year we made such a trip–the others being around Christmas, on Easter, and maybe her birthday in February, or the anniversary of her death perhaps in January.

One time, perhaps in college or high school, I looked over at my Dad and saw tears.  It was so uncomfortable. I’d never seen him teary before.  I wish I had talked to him then. I wish we had said more. And I wish he was here now to know him more and for him to know his grandson.

To this day, I think about those tears.  What were they about? Yes, perhaps it was about missing her. But what else?

I was such a brat.  He was difficult.  But the bottom line was that he did everything for me possible. A man, in his fifties, with a hard history already behind him, left with a five-year-old daughter to raise solo.  And so he did.

So Mother’s Day is a little about him too–even though there is a holiday reserved for him coming up next month.

And she.  What love did she give me those 5 years?  If it’s as immense as I feel for Baxter, and I think it was, it makes me sad that she knew she had to leave it all behind.  What a terrible thing to know.  But on the bright side, I have to say, I’m glad she and I had time together at all.

There too was that thing that I know now a little something about what it means to be a mother.

And gratitude for all the women, mothers or not, who I call friends.