Happy Mother's Day.
Thank you for bearing me for nine months and bearing with me for decades since. I am grateful in ways that bear a public letter to the world.
I'm sure every son feels this way, but you are a great beauty. One of the reasons I wanted to act was because I thought my mother looked like a movie star. I'm not sure you ever realize what a great beauty you were and still are. And you have style. I've never not known you to walk into a room wearing the perfect outfit, the right jewelry and shoes, even a hat. Hats are not worn the way they once were. You know how to wear a hat.
Many people don't realize this about you, but many people didn't get to spend the quiet times you and I did while I was growing up, you making sure our home was immaculate while the radio played in the background. And you would sing. You have a beautiful singing voice. A rich, full mezzo-soprano with amazing power. Everything I love about music started with you and it continues to be my favorite thing to share with you. You called me Sunny Boy and made up a song for me, and together, we would sing Good Morning Starshine and Puff the Magic Dragon. I don't know if I've ever been happier.
Your epic relationship with Dad fills me with endless pride. The way you love one another is not perfunctory or habitual; you love one another like you just met on a balcony. Your love has been a constant in my life, and because I know it took a world of work to hold on to one another through some serious hardships that most of us have to go through to one degree or another, you turned to one each instead of away, and your constancy leaves me in awe.
Thank you for sitting through hundreds of guitar and voice lessons when I was too young to drive myself. How that didn't drive you crazy is beyond me. Thank you for coming to nearly every single show I have ever been in (I can count two you've missed, and both were the weather's fault). Thank you for doing nothing but encouraging me in an unconventional life, for understanding that my happiness was more important than the money I might have earned had I put my mind to something more marketable.
I was at the doctor's yesterday. To this day, I well up a bit after seeing a doctor, because you are not in the waiting room like the thousands of times you were with my bad ears, with my thumb caught in a car door. But even four years ago when I had my last surgery on my ear, there you were. I hope you have some idea of the extraordinary comfort I felt coming out of anesthesia and seeing the first face that I ever saw.
You had five children, but made each one of us feel special. I still can't quite figure out how you maneuvered that. But of course you have many talents. You draw beautifully and I've inherited your penchant for doodling. Your penmanship is exquisite, an art unto itself. You can type like a demon, and take shorthand as if you had been using it every day in the fifty years you haven't. You went back to work when you didn't have to, once you had raised us, to start a new chapter in your life, outside of the home once again, where you found new friends and made a host of other people happy.
Your friends adore you, your family worship you, and your grandchildren honor you and reflect your generous heart and, of course, your great beauty. I see your beauty in each of them.
I'll go on about Dad come June, as he has a letter of equal praise due him as well. But on this Mother's Day, please know that my heart is so full of love for you that any facility I might have with words fails me at this moment. You are beyond words to me. You are my whole heart.
I love you,
Jeff
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