Story: A Mom's Thanksgiving

We are ending this week short due to the Thanksgiving holiday and will be back Monday with lots of great posts! Before signing out: Designing Mom Tori had recently requested for us to write about our holiday traditions and this is my contribution...

by Designing Mom Cat

It was the day after Thanksgiving last year that I received the call from my dad that my mother had passed away. I was in the second trimester of my pregnancy. My sister was in her third. To be honest, I can't even quite remember what we did last Thanksgiving...just that everything was chaotic, pensive, incomprehensible as my mother lay comatose from a sudden brain hemorrhage in hospice.


In the weeks leading to her hemorrhage, my father said she was frantic, insistent on completing a set of albums that chronicled my siblings and my childhood. He remembered she had a look of utter relief when she placed the last photo into one of our books as she breathed, "finished." On the plane ride back to San Francisco I carried my set back...two albums filled with meticulously documented photos from the time I was a newborn. These were the photos I pored over after the birth of my son, staring at photos of myself at 6 weeks, 3 months, 5 months to see when I was rolling, propping myself up on elbows... Finding answers to all of the questions I would have asked my mother about.


My mother was absolutely beautiful, modest, hard-working and she adored my father. I'll be sharing those details about his paw-paw and the albums of my childhood with my son each and every Thanksgiving. We will make her favorite cranberry orange relish together. We will indulge in the luxury of simple pleasures and memories which were all the things my mother treasured most. There is so much to be thankful for.

It is hard to believe I am writing this on the one year anniversary of my mother's passing. But I wanted to share this because this is how Designing Moms started. As an ode to my mother. An outreach to surround myself with moms for creative and personal support when all I wanted to do was retreat. For that I am so grateful to have the support of all of my Designing Moms, read their amazing posts and projects, and to have the support of all of you readers out there. I wish all of you a heart-filled Thanksgiving with your family and little ones.
xxx-ooo, Cat