Carrie Link

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today is my mom's birthday, 76 and looking good. Born 9 years and 3 days after my dad.

My mom is a P.K., Preacher's Kid, born between two set of boys and forever affected. My grandparents had three sons, my mom, three more sons, then my aunt. My grandmother always joked that she would have loved another daughter, but wasn't willing to have three more sons just to get one.

"The Boys" went on to make names for themselves. In a town where four of them lived, as well as my mother, when giving her last name she was repeatedly told, "Oh! I didn't know there were any girls in the family!"

In the small studio apartment my grandmother lived after being widowed, she had but one surface to display photographs of her huge family. Above the dresser she hung the high school graduation pictures of all six boys. On the dresser, behind all the other pictures, my mom's and aunt's sat. Forever a bone of contention with my mom, she never got a satisfactory answer out of my grandmother as to why the girls "didn't make the wall".

I recently spent time with an astrologer. She told me it was in my charts that I would do the work my grandmother and mother had always wanted to do, but didn't, due to societal and family pressures.

It feels good knowing I am not doing just what is right for me and my daughter and possibly generations to come, but for generations that have come before, as well.

Happy birthday, Mom.