September 11 is my mother's birthday. My mother died at the age of 44 in 1997, so it's been a long time since she's been gone. However, there isn't a day goes by that I think of my mother, and that I am truly inspired by her.
My mother was many things to different people. She was a wife to my father. She kept the household running while taking care of our family. She was a mother to me, my three sisters and my brother. She was a sister to all of her siblings, brothers, step-sisters, half-sisters, half-brother and the like. She was a grandmother, more grandchildren came after she passed. She was also a daughter. She was a childcare giver to many, many children over the years (I think my father mentioned it was a count of 50 children over many years). Mom also taught young and first time mothers how to be a "mom" and how to care for their child.
Mom also had internal struggles, stemming from abuse as a child and even the ups and downs in her marriage. Mom also never realized how special a human being she was. She taught us all to not judge, and best of all, to be kind.
Mom had five children, and all of the other children she took care of, and she also took the time to herself. She loved writing letters (and these were handwritten letters ... email wasn't even invented yet) or she did recorded letters on cassette tapes to her friends. Mom also wrote in a daily diary and a private journal. She also wrote what we call a never ending story. It was all written in long hand, in numbered notebooks, everything from steno, to five subject notebooks, to yellow legal size notebooks. She would write, and then read to us what she wrote, and it continued on. Mom was a fan of the soap opera "General Hospital", so she used what would be called a fan-fiction (but this wasn't invented yet), used the characters names from the show to give us a picture in our head about her characters, but created her own storylines and plots. She never finished the story, but she continued to write. Mom was very talented and she never knew it. She was self-conscious and didn't always believe in herself. Mom was strong and brave, and she died way too young.
I am dedicating this post to the memory of my mother, Susan Marie Germond Shannon. She and my father celebrated 25 years on September 11 1996. (They were married on her 19th Birthday). Mom passed away on January 7 1997.
To this day, she still inspires me and I hope that if she were hear, reading my words, she would enjoy them as I enjoy the memory of her words.