Usually, I’ll wait ’til Mothers’ Day weekend (which always hits right around my mom’s birthday) to post about how awesome my mom was. But next weekend, I’m going to be pretty dang busy and, assuming I’m going to be both busy *and* emotional, I’d rather just go ahead and get this post made. Plus, it’s on my mind. So, here it is.

My mom fucking rocked. And not just slightly. A whole hell of a lot.

Mom was a depression-era kid whose dad helped bring unionization to the steel mills and whose mom filled WWII shells with Tetryl powder.

Charlsie was most often described as WISE. Even though she didn’t have “book smarts” beyond two years of community college (which was a source of great stress for her, and the reason my advanced degrees were a source of great pride for her), she read everything she could get her hands on and was a brilliant, gifted, yet sometimes “hillbilly” philosopher who spent the majority of her adult life as a world-renowned astrologer with thousands of clients.

Yep. It’s true. I grew up a Montessori kid in a single-parent New Age household in the ’70s. I was there while my mom studied A Course in Miracles, I was trained in the practice of Reiki before I was 13, and I knew that my Venus was afflicted in Leo before I was sure whether or not Santa existed. My mom was invited to be a part of Oprah Winfrey’s big “remembering your spirit” initiative in the late ’90s. You remember — when she had John Gray and Iyanla Vanzant and Les Brown and Deepak Chopra on all the time? Yeah. Mom was their peer. And her ego — her lack of formal education and the shame that comes with having a gift you can’t back up with a degree — kept her from saying yes. Well… that, plus the fact that she was never a very public person. That was my job.

Anyway. I’m writing all of this now because the lovely Annie Wood posted a comment at the MySpace version of my blog not too long ago, mentioning that she would’ve loved to have met my mom. And, well, truth be told, Keith mentions about once every few weeks how much he wishes he could’ve met my mom. Frankly, she was one fascinating, beautiful, wise, wonderful, soul-filled, hungry-for-knowledge, optimistic, giving, stubborn woman. And I wish that all y’all could’ve met her.

And not just because that would mean that she would still be around for the meeting. 😉 Moreover because I think that a huge part of who I am — duh, this probably goes without saying and is true for all creatures — is so completely tied up in who she was. I mean, I have this very simple, artistically-gifted, handsome dad (and I’m grateful for having his eyes, his bone structure, his cool-as-ice-logic, his talent for all things performance-related — if not as grateful for having his side of the family’s enormous ass-and-thigh spread) with whom I spent very little time… and then I have this incredibly complex “country” mom who became more worldly than I might ever be — and I mean that in the sense of *understanding* the world, not experiencing it.

I remember being in my late teens and having friends who appreciated Mom’s gifts far more than I had ever appreciated them (at that point — which was mainly due to having tried to fit in in a school where I was the Andie to the Pretty in Pink world of richies who were nice enough to let me attend their excellent school even though I lived a hair over the tracks from jurisdiction and was one of the only kids there with only one parent and zero trust fund) and saying, “Well, I guess I never realized that — when I got parental advice from Mom — I wasn’t just getting ‘there, there’ type advice, but instead was getting an understanding of the ‘Fairy Godmother Complex’ in my chart or the ‘Fairness Voice’ caused by having both rising and moon in Libra.”

And every year, when I would come home on a break from school or “life in LA” and sit across from Mom in the bear-chairs I would eventually give to my favorite ex-boyfriend Chip and roll tape to get a reading, I would value it less for what she was telling me as an astrologer and more for just getting to sit with my mom for hours on end, talking about EVERYTHING and why it felt the way it felt (at some deeper level than just because “that’s how it feels”).

When I feel how very hard it is sometimes (not often — I’m actually pretty dang balanced, as humans go) to just live this creative life, I wish so hard that I had another hour with my mom. Not just because she would pet my head or baby talk me or tell me I was perfect or any of those things that moms do for their baby girls, but because she would tell me to watch out for Mercury Retrograde coming up or look at the chart of a colleague and say, “Girl! Watch out! This guy is a wannabe player-slash-liar who will end up promising you the spoils of worlds he’ll only ever get access to because of his affiliation with you.”

Most importantly, I never worried that my mom wondered how much she was loved. I grew up in a home where “I love you” was uttered more frequently than any other phrase. And meant… every single time. We simply didn’t part ways with anyone wondering whether she was loved. What a gift! And as much as I would cherish another hour with my momma, I have to say I wouldn’t trade anything that we already had together — or that we still have together cosmically — for anything.

It’s all been that damn good. And that’s what’s important.

Related posts: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (among others, but that’ll get you started). 😉 Thank you — in advance — everyone who always gives me such amazing support with this type of post. It’s just my way of getting a little therapy via 1’s and 0’s. So, thank you. Again.

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!