A Letter to My Daughters on their Birthday

7 years ago I became a mom. Just thinking about that brings tears to my eyes.

 

 

To think that I grew 3 babies inside of me, delivered them and have nurtured them for 7 years (my twins will almost be 5) still feels surreal.  Where has the time gone? Are we raising our children “right”? Am I teaching them life lessons? So many questions you constantly ask yourself as a parent.

 

This year is going to be a hard year for me as a mom.  My mom died when I was 7 years old from a brain tumour.  She was pregnant with me when she found out and fought for 7 years to survive but her tumour won.  She left behind 5 children, a husband, family and friends.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of my mom.  Even when I’m struggling and having a bad day, I have to stop and think that my mom and dad still raised their children and carried on each day despite all the surgeries and hospital visits.

I keep thinking of my 7 year old daughter.  The smile on her face when we do something fun together.  The conversations we have together after we read books. The pictures she draws me that says ” I love my mom”.  I missed out on a lot of this behaviour when I was 7.   It is not fair that someone that young could lose their mother. So I do whatever I can to live a healthy life.  I’m doing whatever I can to raise my daughters to live a healthy life.  If by chance my life is thrown a curve ball, I’ll do my best to dodge it or deal with getting hit.  Life is unfair sometimes and I have learnt to try to focus on the positives versus always on the negatives.

I don’t have a lot of memories of my mom.  I don’t know if I was just too young when she passed away or I buried all the sad feelings deep down and have blocked my memories from my childhood (yes, I have been to a psychologist and have worked through my mother’s death and can talk way more openly about it now than before).  I do have two favourite memories of her.

1. We used to go and feed the chickadees in the winter time together.  I remember the smile of both mine and my mom’s face when the birds would land on our hands and listening to their singing.  I do believe in guardian angels and every time I see a chickadee I know that my mom is around keeping me and my family safe.

   

2. My mom used to write poetry.  She wrote such beautiful poetry and it had a theme of the seasons.  I found a copy of one of her poems that had “To Rachelle” on the top and “Love Mother” at the bottom in her handwriting.  I cherish that piece of paper. To have something that my mom wrote is so special.  I guess being the youngest of 5 children and everything she had going on with her brain tumour, I didn’t have a lot written in my baby book! So seeing her writing and those simple words mean a lot to me.

So this brings me to the whole point of my story …. every year on my daughters’ birthdays, I write a letter to them . Not email, not on my computer, a hand written letter to them. I let them know what they were like in the previous year.  Thoughts and emotions from a mom’s point of view.  I don’t make it elaborate.  I don’t write on fancy paper or put stickers on it, because that’s not me.  I want my daughters to know who I was through these letters … just in case I die and don’t have a chance to say good bye to them.

I know, it’s an awful way of thinking, but I didn’t have a chance to grow up with a mom. I wish I would have had the chance to learn so much from her. The questions I would have asked her. The stories I would have loved to sit down and hear. The sound of her voice telling me a story or sing me a song. A letter that would have let me know what kind of child I was. Knowing what kind of mother she was and the struggles or happiness she felt being a mom.

So this is my gift to my 3 daughters, a letter on their birthdays.  I hope that I’m around for 100 years to write them a letter every year because seeing how much they have grown in the past 5 to 7 years have been amazing …just imagine what all the letters will say every year they get older!