Gratitude Month 2025: Being a Mother

As I gear up for the single most cooking/baking/preparing day of the year, Thanksgiving Day, I am pondering all the wonderful ways that I am blessed as a mother who does all this cooking, baking, and preparing. This past week, I was shown a couple of things surrounding food that help me know I am doing alright and not completely failing in my attempts to be a good mom to adult children, so I want to take time to celebrate each of them. 

I have one child who will always need my help for as long as we both are alive, and I have been thinking about how her need for me to help her helps me have unique purpose and softens the blow of the empty nester life. Granted, it also hinders the empty nester life's perks, but I love to serve and spend time with my family, so I love that I can do what I can to help this child and recognize that she helps me in the process. 

My oldest son is always someone I can talk to and be real with, and I am so thankful to know that he is working hard to take care of himself. I love how he is able to find simple things to make a difference for himself and to lift our family. I just wish I saw him a little more often, but so goes life. I am so thankful for this young man who was my little buddy before life got crazy with all this growing up stuff. 

 

Something that has been appreciated lately is when my youngest daughter comes over from time to time to bake cookies and other stuff. I know it helps her, but it helps me too. I love to see her being so kind and giving and wanting to share with others. This week, she came over to make pies from my pie recipe for a young single adult activity to make it nice for people who are gluten free. Her motivation to make the stuff I make reminds me of the love my mom put into the foods she made for us that motivated me to want to carry on those foods for my children. Food can be such a generational connector, and I am thankful for it especially since my parents died before any of my children were alive or could really get to know them. Knowing my daughter is learning and loving some things from our family food traditions gives me a lot of joy, so much really. I am thankful for it. 

And my youngest got home last week after working on the other side of the country for four months, and one of the first things he told me other than work updates and car stuff talk was how he missed my cooking. He didn't say it like that though. We were both just getting ready for the day, me preparing for leaving in the front room area and he in the bathroom brushing teeth and doing his hair. He started telling me a story about how someone he was working with to sell insurance to had invited him to stay for dinner. I thought that was really nice, and then he said he was sitting there beginning to eat dinner with them, and as he was eating, he realized that it had been months since he had eaten a home cooked meal and felt so thankful for the food I have made over the years that he just about broke down in tears right at table. He said it all so casually as he was getting ready that I would have been out of place to make a moment of it, but it was a moment to me. I had made dinner the night before and prepared some Cream of Rice for breakfast, and I guess those simple things reminded him. I am writing this here right now, so I do not forget what he said and how he said it all so matter of factly with such honestness of heart. I am thankful for that. 

My children keep showing me that some things are going right, and I am so thankful for their show of love to me in their individual ways that mean so much.