nasquasha

Cheryl Strayed is maybe my favorite author.  I just stumbled on this essay she wrote about being a mother and a writer, which obviously is in my wheelhouse. Read the whole piece, but here is a snippet:

“My mother never met her grandson. She died young, when I was twenty-two and she was forty-five, and her death has been my life’s greatest sorrow. Before I had my son, every time I made a wish on a star or a set of birthday candles, I always wished for the same thing: that I could see my mom again for one more minute, and in that minute I would tell her that I loved her over and over again. But now my wish had changed. I wanted to say thank you to her and to tell her that I had no idea how hard it was to be a mother, and how hard, in particular, she’d had it, not only while she was married to my father, but after they’d divorced and she’d become a single mother. I wanted to thank her for not ever running out the door in hysterics or smashing my head against the wall even though she must have had a thousand impulses to do so. And most of all, I wanted to tell her that now that I was a mom, I understood something that had never occurred to me before: that when she had raved about the smell or weight of a baby in her arms, she hadn’t really been talking about that borrowed baby, she had been talking about me.”