Dec. 14: APPRECIATE

Appreciate. What's the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

I truly mean it when I say I have come to appreciate my mother more than anything this past year. I think back to when we'd fight and not speak and it kills me to think how selfish and stupid I was. Especially now I put it in perspective because of my wedding. I would be lost without her. This is her first and last child's wedding (my brother is gay and my sister ran away and got married and shut my mom out of everything) It kills me everyday to think how inactive my siblings are with my mother. Do they not need her like I do? Do they ever think that she needs them? They're both too self consumed to ask themselves that question though. Instead my brother calls, maybe once a month to talk about himself. He's promised her for the past year that he'd come home to visit, and he hasn't. I'm pretty sure he'll come up with an excuse to not attend my wedding as well (nice, huh?) I guess you can say I make up for both of them. Even though she lives 5 mins away from me I still call her at least every other day. She knows mostly everything going on in my life. We go to the gym together maybe 2-3 nights a week. We have retail therapy together of course. And lunch dates on the weekends every now and then. Not to mention our weekly Sunday family dinners that my fiance and I go to at my parents house. Since my mom is older (almost 70) it kills me to think I need to bend over backwards t appreciate the time I have with her, because I know she may not be around most of my adult life. And I start to cry everytime I think of that.