My mum

made me a family of cabbage patch dolls when I was 7 years old. Sewing not being one of my mother's strong suits, these dolls - especially the first doll she made, Cecelia - were kind of funny looking - but I loved those dolls. I still do, in fact - they're in my bedroom. Cecelia, Margie, Katie Baby, Emily, Mark, Julie & Gary (the preemie twins) - she made me a little doll family, and on Christmas morning I came down to the living room and it was set up like a nursery, with each dolly in it's own bed and each w/ birth certificates - it was the best Christmas ever. Margie had a face made out of nylon, and eventually her face got a run in it. So Mum set up our kitchen like an operating room, with toilet paper tubes for IVs and surgical masks and everything, and we operated on Margie and gave her a brand new pale pink face, she was so pretty. My mum would sing me lullabyes every single night, until I was about 12 - yes, I was a strange kid - and she understood my neediness but didn't let it overcome me. When I was a horrible, nasty, asshole teenager and said something mean to her she sang 'I don't like you, but I love you... seems like I'm always thinking of you...' you know that song? It's an oldie - anyway, it was the perfect thing at the perfect moment that made me just stop and remember who I was, and who she was. (it only lasted a minute I'm sure, and then teenageriness overtook me again) When my mum went to field camp for a few weeks when I was young I would sleep with her sneakers (???) in my bed, wearing her t-shirt every night.
When I was 19 she stayed up all night with me while I cried when my boyfriend, my first love - that she hated - broke up with me and I thought my heart was broken. She has been a constant source of support and love and wisdom and humor and strength my whole life, if I am a good mother - a good person - at all it is because of her and all she has given me emotionally.
To have the shadow of a possibility cross in front of my sunshine mother is a hard thing, one we all go through eventually as we get older - but one that I am not remotely prepared to face, and hope with all my heart I don't have to. I don't know how to be a person without my parents, both of them.