Mums

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
                                                            - Alice Walker

Brilliant Mum: taken at the 2010 Hamilton Mum Show.

Mums; moms; mothers - Most of us are blest to have had one mother; I have had three. Each has played a role in the person I am today - for better or worse.

Like everyone, I have a birth mother - from whom I was separated at a young age; our reunion was almost fifty years in the making. I had a foster mother - my father's sister to whom he entrusted my care till I reached the age of ten years; sadly, she has passed on. I have a stepmother - at age twenty-four, mother of an infant son, she found herself mothering a headstrong ten-year-old.

From my aunt, I was gifted with a fiercely independent spirit; from my stepmother I learned the strength and beauty of quiet dignity; from my birth mother, I have learned that Nurture cannot trump Nature!

Nature, in all its iterations is an unstoppable force...