It's Mom Time!
Reading this poem won't hurt, but it might make you cry. POEM by BILLY COLLINS, DRAWINGS by DOROTHY MOORE'S SON
MY BOOK-GROUP PAL LISA sent me a Billy Collins poem (below) to honor the women who brought us into this world, and worked even harder to ensure that we would live long enough to abandon them as teens. Sigh. That’s a tough job, and my mom did it four times, persevering all the way through Son #4. I’m grateful for that, because #4 was me. Thanks for that, Dorothy Habel Moore, and may you rest in peace. You certainly deserve a break.
The summer of my ninth year post-birth, I went off to Camp Teepee, in Newtown, Connecticut. During arts and crafts, I was encouraged to pick up plastic strips we called “gimp” and weave them into a bracelet for my mom. It was blue and red, and it was on her bedside table when she died at age 97. As Billy Collins points out below, she may have felt that it was a kind of recompense for all she did for me. As an adult, I thanked her a thousand times for loving me into existence, but was that enough gratitude? Only a thousand?
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