The kids and I spent a couple days with my grandparents in my hometown recently.

“You know, Sue, they’re real good,” Granny Helen thumbs in the direction of my four offspring softly closing her door, over and over, as they run in and out—heavens knows it is the only door they know how to close quietly. Granny Helen has a pitch in her voice when yelling about her doors  (or her plants) that freezes the blood in your body, slowing all momentum. “They do what you ask, but darn if they’re not creative! They just keep finding new things to get into!”

Don’t I know it. Granny has nearly nine decades under her belt—it makes me listen long. As the kids tear around the apple orchard, my Granny tells me that she worried many days that CPS would come for her boys, my dad and his two brothers. They were just boys being boys: acid experiments gone wrong, mattress-sledding off the roof, a flipped jeep, baseball bat battles, and swimming in the canal. She wondered how they survived it all; she wonders how she survived it all. The stories are fresh, as if they flipped that jeep yesterday, instead of fifty years ago. In her words, I hear the making of a mom. The stories spill out of her, a reassurance. I know her fear.

I watch my four run, each one carrying a piece of me with them. They yell and trip and bang and clatter. I cry when they fall. I cringe when we hurt each other with harsh words and snap judgments. Here in family is where we are broken. Here in family is where we are healed, maybe the grown-ups most of all. My grandparents dissolve from marble into human beings. I’ll be telling my grown grandchildren the same fears tomorrow it seems.

Thank you to all the ‘moms’ in my life… the fellow trench moms, the moms alone, the moms to be, and the spiritual moms (That includes you Nancy and Cheryl… you who have influenced more ‘children’ in your lives than all of us put together!)

And I thank God for my beautiful mom, my amazing mother-in-law, my Granny Helen and my Granny Jane. You all have spoken volumes of love and encouragement into my life and passed on a legacy I only hope I can live up to. Happy Mother’s Day.