I want to say Thank You to all of those mother's out there that work to make the lives of their loved ones special each day. As you know, a mom's day never ends. We get up thinking of what laundry needs to be done so that the kids have nice clean clothes to wear to school. Then grab the iron for a pressed shirt so our husband looks sharp heading to the office. Do the kids need to comb their hair? Are their teeth brushed? Who's going to drive them to their activities after school and cheer them on? Why Mom of course! After we get the kids off to school the real work begins. Cleaning, making beds, vacuuming, planning for the next meal or two. Feeding all the animals and letting the dogs in and out as needed. Maybe we go to work to help pay monthly expenses or join the ranks of stay of home moms. Don't think the life of a stay at home mom is easy because it's not! I used to think "What would I do if I stayed at home all day?" Would I run out of things to do? What I found out was that when you stay at home and live in your house there's more work to be done. You can't just mop your way out the door and have it stay clean. You live there and it get's dirty so you end up mopping again and again and again...

I look back on my childhood and wonder how my mom ever survived raising us as kids.

My dad took off before I was a year old and left seven of us for my mom to raise without any support. My childhood was a bit like Dolly Parton's, if you can believe her ballads. We didn't have nice clothes. We had only a single pair of shoes. Every year mom would give us each a new pair that had to last us for the subsequent year. We never had a TV. In fact, back in those days Mendocino County only had two TV stations, both of them usually full of snow.

We were growing up poor with nothing but our crops, our animals, our neighbors, and ourselves. But my childhood was not deprived. Even now, when I look back on those days I believe that we were rich, in the most important sense. We ate what we grew. We entertained ourselves by our work and by our imagination. We belonged to the great cadences of seasons and weather. We were living as human beings were designed to live. All this under the love and care of my mother.

When we started our own family we lived on a ranch for most of the kids life so I had the house to clean as well as the barns to sweep and horses, alpacas, chickens, ducks, rabbits and other critters to tend to. As a mother I wanted to be sure my kids grew up with the responsibility of animals to develop an outward focus rather than self-centeredness. The horses required the most effort. We trained several weanlings over the years. Sometimes the kids and I would have to walk them all night if they had colic.

To quote Sophia Loren "When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child." Moms are natural caregivers and we will care for our loved ones without giving it a second thought. We should remember to give our Mom's a break on their special day and always try to give them a break when it's possible as the work of a mom never ends!

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