Have I Told You That I Love You Yet Today?

It had been a pretty long time since I really sat and thought about my mother. It has been quite a few years since she passed away, and in all the busyness of life in the 21st century… well there is just not near enough time for quiet reflection anymore.

I have to thank my niece, Marcia, for leaving me a simple phone message that brought back a flood of memories that made me just STOP to enjoy a beautiful memory that has now been in the back of my mind for days. Yes, THANK YOU Marcia, I love you too, and you will never know just how much this has meant to me.

When I was a baby, back before I have any memories at all, I had a rash that would not go away. As it was told to me years later, the doctor told my mother that maybe I just did not feel loved. My mother began, and continued for as long as I lived at home, at least once a day to ask me, “Have I told you that I love you yet today?” It was often followed by, “Well I do!” Sometimes she would just look at me and say "yet today?" and I knew exactly what she meant.

It was on the last day of Hanukkah this year, that Marcia was thinking of her grandmother, and left me a voicemail “Have I told you that I love you yet today?”  No one had asked me that for so long that I had completely forgotten I had ever heard it at all, and hearing those words again has brought the warmth of my mother’s love with them.  It has also reminded me just how much I miss her.

It is a poignant reminder that when all is said and done, it is the littlest things that matter the most, and that an expression of true love holds the essence of the love within it long after the words are spoken.  And so I close this tribute to my mother with a few verses from my favorite poet…

“All of these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing floor,

Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,

And weep, but not all of your tears.” Kahlil Gibran

Have I told you that I love you yet today? Well I do!

Blessings & Adventure,

Lynn "lynnibug" Rios