Today is certainly not the best day.  Eight years ago today I lost my mother to a very long battle with cancer.  I miss her every day and think of her when I look at my girls and how much she would eat them up.  I was devastated when she died just two weeks shy of E’s birth.  But she lives on in them and most importantly she lives on in me.  I am a better mother for having known her and (although it sounds weird) for having lost her.  I have a legacy of greatness to live up to.  I love this quote shared with me by a friend who also lost her mother.  It’s by author Cheryl Strayed (aka: Sugar.)

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.

Since I am a teenage girl at heart, I have a playlist dedicated to my mom.  This song is the very first track.  It makes me smile, it makes me cry, it makes me know how lucky I am to have had her as my mom.