For My Mom, Born Beautiful and Free on the Summer Solstice

From my mom, who read my blog for the first time:

Dear Wendy, I read your I guess it is called blog. I loved the pictures of you and Ben, your writing and the feelings expressed . . . I will read more later. Love, Mom.

I love my mom. I love and appreciate her more since becoming a mom. She was the original "attachment parent" before they had a name for it. She wrote poems before I was born, and when I found them as a teenager, I saw deeper into her heart and into my own. I can't believe she raised two young girls as a single mom. She stayed home for almost three years with my sister even though she could barely afford it, and when I asked her how she did it, she said "I had no choice."

Two weeks ago, at the end of an exhausting week, Ben up all night, teething, tantruming, my body depleted, my mind fuzzy, I ran into my mother at the train station. I wasn't sure how I was going to make it through the rest of the day, and I was starving out of my mind (all night nursing can do that to you). My mother had apples and cheese, a bottle of cold water. I ate and drank and was cured. Then we rode the train together and looked out the window, Ben on my lap, my mother across from us, the train rocking past Little Neck Bay, past the town my mother grew up in, and onto Great Neck, where I spent my teenage years and where my mother lives now.

Thank you, Mom.