Dear Mom.......

Dear Michele,

It's been eight years since I sat by your bedside and watched you pass beyond my life. By that time, I had become the parent, doing my best to enrich the limited years I knew you had left, and putting my foot down when your room overflowed with the things that pack-rats gather, and I had to force you to choose what to keep and what to let go. I watched as the talented artist you once was struggled to maintain that boundless talent, hobbled by the limitations your illness placed upon you. I did everything I could to ensure that I knew everything a son could know about the mother he had discovered so late in life, and to appreciate the gift I'd been granted in doing so, even though it placed burdens upon me that no man of that age would have expected. I am so grateful that the allegiance I had to you, however unearned, did not prevent the woman I love from loving me, the woman I call my wife. But most of all, Michele, I am blessed for having gotten to meet, fall in love with, and accept the woman who gave birth to me and never stopped loving me despite the hatred I had for you for abandoning me, even though I eventually learned that it was my father who separated us, who himself actually DID abandon me rather than return me to the one person in my life who always loved me unconditionally.
You never had a chance to share with me your idea of what life was all about, to teach me lessons that you had learned in your hard life, or to be there for those milestones that every young man passes through on his way to adulthood. You never got the chance to know what potential I had, and to nurture it. You were robbed of birthdays, Christmases, report cards, and temper tantrums. You did not have the chance to discover what it was like to have to consider sacrifices for a part of you that would carry on after you were gone. And you never had the chance to see if perhaps you could draw out in me the talent that you could very well have passed on to me, but was never encouraged. I need not forgive you for any of these things, for they were not your failings. All these possibilities were denied both you and I by one man, who totally disgraced his responsibility.
I do not spend much of my valuable time or karma even thinking about him, that sperm donor who helped bring me into this world. But I do put alot of effort into remembering the memories you were able to leave me with, wonderful memories that I shall carry with me till my dying day, until hopefully I can see you again and ask you if I did you proud during the life you gave me. I try, Mom, I really do, but it haunts me that your little boy did not perhaps reach the heights you might have wished him to. All I know is that in the end, I truly knew the joy of having you in my life, despite all those attempts by less than honorable people, and perhaps fate itself, to keep that from happening. I will probably never be able to impart the totality of your wonderful essence to people who never knew you, but I promise you that as long as I draw breath, you will live on in one heart.......the heart of your little boy who has never stopped loving you and misses you sooooooo much!

Your one and only son,

Michael