Growing up, I thought I was the only daughter who lost her mother at the age of fourteen, yet my biological mother raised me and is still very much alive.

As an adult, many think that I grieve your absence because God called you home, but not so, at least to my knowledge.

How can you grieve someone that is twenty minutes away by car if that? How can you have such a void in today’s time when technology allows you to facetime from any place around the world?

I woke on your birthday mentally refusing to accept the calendar had moved forward another day. Think Goggle and Facebook are showing me memories from when I honored your birthday just before the clock striking midnight, years past!

Requesting my prayer group pray for you as your birthday was still 24 hours away.

Forgetting I promised another to attend her event, not only because her event not only fell on your birthday, but she shared your first name. Thankfully, the love she has shown me over the last twenty-five year is what I wish to receive from you, but her presence in my company would only amply your absence all the more.

See, I blocked out anything that would make me remember that after living half-century, I still yearn and pray for the woman that gave birth to me to truly see me for who I am and love me with no strings attached.

To see that the child that was expected to be nothing is very much someone!

See, today I am a mother of two like you. Unlike you, I have two boys whose bloodline is identical.

Like you, I make sure that they are educated without suffering the ills that I faced with the educational system but place no limits on high they will soar.

Like you, I accept medical diagnoses to attain the services to correct perceived issues but defy prognoses knowing that God gave me two mighty men of valor.

Yes, like you, I found myself divorced from my children’s father, but despite his ideologies, I won’t deny my sons the right to have a relationship with their father. Nor will I  allow another man’s possibilities to block their relationship either.

Maybe I am still that odd daughter, the one that doesn’t have a relationship with her mother yet yearns for one. Have I been deprived or short-changed? Not all!

See the God I was taught about back in Ohio; I found Him again when I was about twenty-seven years old. God gave me a hug when I asked if He was real and if he really loved me. The one who said, “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then the LORD will take care of me.” Psalm 27:10

See, over the years, I learned the one whom I  yearned to be closed was the creator of my pain. The pain that birth purpose, endurance, and voice I have today.

The one who bled over my sons because of an open wound from her childhood that never healed, yet she forgot that part of her might be in me as I protected them from her venom.

Her words that played on repeat in my head, instead feud the determination to accomplished more. At first, to make her proud, then just for me, but now to leave a legacy, not of pain, but of hope as I break the chains of generation pass.

Yes, I have forgiven her actions towards me as a child. I have forgiven her deeds towards my sons. I pray for restoration with our Heavenly Father that all her works won’t burn in the trial by fire. But as long as she has breath, as long God hears my prayer and grants her another day, another year, the little girl will always seek unconditional love from the only human that it should come freely.

However, understand I am because she brought me into this world by God’s creation, I became who I am by God’s design, and I walk in my purpose designed by God. So if I never feel and hear those words from her, God has shared them with me with each spiritual mom He has brought into my life.

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