On my desk stands a photo of my daughters, sisters, grandson, mother and me. It was taken at the time of mum’s 96th birthday in August 2018. My eldest sister had it mounted on a block of wood and gave it to mum. It graced the desk at the end of her bed, beside her TV. She looked at it every day as French CBC played on the screen and she sat in her wheelchair and watched and listened to life beyond her room. She prayed for each of us in the photo and often placed a finger she’d kissed against her great-grandson’s face.

As I sit at my desk and watch the river flow in the ever-widening channel it carves through the ice and the sun slowly tints the sky rose and pink and periwinkle blue, I feel the presence of that photo. It graces my desk now. It holds memory. It tells a story. Of the past. Of the future.

Tears well up in my eyes. Not because I miss my mother, or wish she were here right now to tell me what to do or how to handle challenges and obstacles on my path. She wasn’t that kind of mother.

My mother was the magnet that brought us all together. She was the one who drew my daughter home to Calgary from Vancouver and my sister from her home in the Gulf Islands. She was the one whose significant birthdays we celebrated as a family whenever possible. Her dancing girls and grand-daughters. Her grandson who gave her the courage, when he was born, to remember the joy of having a son without the pain of his loss over-shadowing her memories.

This photo is her story of life, its threads woven through the warp and weave of her journey. It is full of the threads she held in her crooked, misshapen fingers and sometimes used to lovingly place kisses on the faces of those she loved. It is surrounded by photos of her mother, father, brothers, sisters, her children, grand-daughters and her grandson.

These photos crowded the walls of her room. Every day she would look at them, say prayers for the departed and those still here. There was little room for a new story to be told on the walls of her room when her time ran out. Yet, the story told in this photo will continue.

It will weave its way into being without my mother’s hands guiding and drawing the story-makers together. It will unfold without my mother’s fingers reaching out, as she does with her grandson in this photo, to link the generations together.

And that is why I cry. A link to the past has broken. There is only the future to foretell. A future where my mother’s hands do not reach across the distance to draw us all together for one more photo of all of us standing around her. Her dancing girls and granddaughters, her great-grandson and her soon to be born, great-granddaughter.

We are now the link. We are now the gatherers. The ones who must draw together the weave and warp of our tapestry to create rich and vibrant hues and stories that will unfold in time.

We are the history-keepers, the story-makers, the tellers of the past, the architects of the future.

I feel the absence of my mother in the photo this morning. She was the one who brought us all together. In her absence, I see the photo that will be taken this summer when my granddaughter is born and a photo is taken of her when she is three months old. Just as my grandson is in this photo.

And I hear my mother’s voice telling me as she so often did when I was younger, in the times before I became a mother and held in disdain her love of family and her desire to gather us all together, “One day you will understand and you will know what family means. I pray you never forget.”

I hear you mum. I know. I will not forget.

photo by @brit_gill

From her first cry to her first smile to her first song, life with Alexis is always an adventure. Over the past 32 years, I have borne witness to the magic and miracle of her voice growing stronger. I have watched her move through toddler stage to little girl, to adolescent, teenager, young woman and now, a mother.

And always, she has enchanted and enthralled. She has been real and fierce and loving and brave.

Today is my eldest daughter’s birthday.

I remember this day 32 years ago. It was much like today promises to be. Bright and sunny. Blue sky soaring into infinity.

Life looked predictable. Like it would always be blue sky and sunny days.

And then Alexis came into this world. She arrived on her terms, on her schedule. We had been anticipating her arrival at the end of May. That day had passed. Alexis wasn’t ready to meet the world yet. Or perhaps, the world wasn’t ready to meet her?

In the end, Alexis Marie erupted onto life’s stage 23 days past her original due date. As I lay on an operating table and the doctor cut into my abdomen, I heard her cries from within my womb and my heart melted. I could feel it. That instantaneous giving way of the boundaries that held all known feeling in place. A letting go of all restraint, an abandoning of life as I knew it as this tiny, precious, perfect being was lifted from the safety of my womb and exposed to the world.

I wanted to keep her close. To keep her tied to the umbilical safety of my being the vessel that embraced her every breath.

And I had to let her go. I had to allow the cord to be cut to give her wings room to grow.

They have been growing ever since.

There is so much in this world I do not know. So much about life and living and loving fearlessly I have yet to explore.

Before I became a mother, I thought I knew it all. I thought I had life figured out and that once I did become a mother, it would be a pretty clearcut, straight forward journey of raising them and setting them on their path with the prerequisite education, tools and hope chest filled with all they needed to live adult lives in an adult world.

Being a mother has taught me how little I knew then about Love, and how much I don’t need to know now about anything else because, in Love’s light, everything else pales.

Alexis is a woman and a mother now. Beautiful. Talented. Creative. Kind. Caring. Loving. I watch her with her infant son and my heart melts all over again.

She sings to him, and I hear angels’ voices.

She dances with him and I see a fairy queen, ethereal, regal, magical.

She paints and writes and creates beauty and wonder in the world all around and I know her son’s life will be filled with magic and beauty, wonder and awe.

She is sensitive and gentle. Fiercely loyal. Fiercely proud. Sometimes, she doubts her own strength, questions her capacity to be courageous. No matter her self-doubts, always she finds her way through because of her heart’s capacity to beat to its own drum, march to its own beat, love in its own rhythm.

Always, she watches out for others. Sees the beauty in every soul, the wonder in every breath. She hears the words that are left unspoken, and feels the pain that is left unhealed and knows exactly how to reach out and soothe another’s fears, another’s tears, another’s sadness.

photo by @brit_gill

She is intuitive. She is whimsical. She is miraculous, just as she always has been. Just as she always will be.

She is a woman, a mother, a daughter, a grand-daughter, a step-daughter, a sister, a step-sister, a niece, a cousin, a friend. She is so many things and has so many ways of being amazing because she is Alexis.

Happy Birthday my darling daughter. Though the miles may lay between us, you are my heart. Forever and always.