One more hour....

I am not sure what is driving it, but recently there have been a lot of memes on my facebook about missing someone, and how nice it would be to have one more hour with that person who is missed.  I have thought a lot about it in the past few days, because today, January 4, 2025, would have been my dad's 102nd birthday, and I always think a lot about him at this time of year.  

Choices

Sunday is Mother's Day, and I am grateful to still have my mother with me.  At 97, every single day is a gift, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to give back to her a little bit of what she has given me for 60 plus years.  

But I have also been thinking about what it means to be a mother to my own children.  Life is a complicated dance between competing obligations, and it can be very hard to decide which steps are most important at any given moment.

Grandparenting 101

 Sometimes the obvious is just not that obvious to me, as I have realized over the last few days.  My grandsons have their birthdays two days apart at the end of April, so I always spend time thinking about them this time of year, reviewing the past year and everything that we have done together and experienced.  And I also spend time thinking about my role in their lives, and what I bring to the table as a grandmother.

But this year, we laid to rest my aunt at age 100, as the boys turned seven and nine, and the juxtaposition of those two events has made me understand this relationship in a whole new way.

My mother's hand....

 I recently had the opportunity to observe, up close, my mother's hand as she lay still and quiet. I wondered what other people saw, when they looked at that hand. It is an elderly hand, one that has seen a lot of hard use over the 97 years it has served her. It is fragile, worn, chapped, swollen, and a little weary from all the work that has been accomplished, and it is ready to have some well deserved rest from its labors, just as my mother is.

But I don't see any of that as I gaze at her today. Instead, here is what I see when I look at my mother's hand.

Slán abhaile.

 I have been thinking about Sinead O'Connor quite a lot the last couple of days, as many people no doubt have.  Full disclosure:  I was not her biggest music fan, for a variety of reasons.  And yet... I was a true fan of her, Sinead, the person, and it is that which I have been thinking about.

Of course, I recognized she had the voice of an angel.  Haunting, emotional, tearing you this way and that.  She had a power like very few ever have to move the listener.  She did not need autotune and lots of special effects to do it.  Her voice, alone, was enough.  Sometimes it was too much, really.  She was almost too real to bear.