August 22nd

My mom took this photo a couple of days ago. She said that as she was walking by sunflowers planted along the street (which in itself is an amazing idea — instead of just having grass patches, to have flowers/wildflowers grow there) and she noticed those bees on the flower and captured this image.

A couple of days ago, she also turned 72 years old. She is still active, but the slow damage of passing time is more and more visible and obvious. She gets tired much more often, she gets irritated easier, she became more stubborn (like refusing to even consider a hearing aid while having problems with deafness). But she still notices and shares those small things around her, she still is curious and willing to try new things (especially when cooking).

We never had an easy relationship and for me, this is a very difficult and private subject — I haven’t really started to discus it in my therapy yet and I know how important it was for development of myself and my character. So I will not start it here — just yet.

But what I can share is that I always knew that she loved me unconditionally, and she sacrificed a lot for me (and my siblings as well). I cannot say that it was the always same from my side…

She also instilled in me the love of reading, and by extension the curiosity about our world, that sustained me as a human being and let me become a person I am now. We always had A LOT of books in our house, and I was free to choose any subject I wanted — without any dogma implied, be it political, social or religious. Come to think about it — that is rather uncommon, growing up children usually are guided by parents and extended family toward what they as adults already believe. And I was free to go in different development directions with understanding tolerance. And that is something that I forever will be grateful for to my mom.