Ken Beaton: If Mom is alive, you are blessed

Today is Mother’s Day. Honoring your mother should not be one day a year. Make the most of each day sharing your time and love with the person who gave birth to you.

If your mom is living, you are a blessed son/daughter. Every day with your mom is a gift. The law of averages is on your side, meaning you likely will live longer than her. I suggest you create many wonderful memories with her. The reality is there will come a day when she will join her relatives and friends who passed on before her.

Many adult children who lost their mom feel she was taken from them much too soon. Each year, besides remembering the anniversary of mom’s passing, they are reminded as Mother’s Day approaches with all the ads for Mother’s Day cards and gifts. Ads with children, adult children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren lovingly gathered around the matriarch of the family. Hallmark and Jacqui Larson create hard-copy and electronic cards to touch the receiver’s emotions and cause one or both eyes to “leak.”

I was a keyboarding teacher for 22 years. Each year, a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day, I would assign my students to type a positive letter to Mom for Mother’s Day thanking her for all she did for them. Occasionally I would have to modify the assignment for a couple of students whose mom had an addiction problem or unresolved issues.

I wanted my students to experience composing on a keyboard, expressing their inner feelings and thanking their mother. Unexpectedly, I received a gift when the mother of one of my students would say “hi” to me in a supermarket or downtown Carson City. Next she would open her purse and remove a well-worn envelope with the Mother’s Day letter from her son/daughter who was in my class. With eyes beginning to glisten she would share with me, “I never go anywhere without my Mother’s Day letter. Thank you for teaching my son/daughter. My heart was touched.”

One of the moms who received a love letter died of cancer a few years after her daughter graduated from high school. That mother was fortunate. She was thanked and experienced her daughter’s love. Every mom should be so fortunate.

Pancreatic and liver cancer took my mother Feb. 20, 1996, eight days before my dad’s 80th birthday. Although I spent 55 Mother’s Days with her, I felt sorry for myself on Mother’s Day 1996. The last time I bought a Mother’s Day card was 1995. On the positive side, Mom has not suffered for eighteen years. Thank you Mom.

Ken Beaton of Carson City contributes occasionally to the Nevada Appeal.