My son sent me a Mother’s Day card.

Pretty pink envelope. Stamp in the right hand corner. He wrote very legibility my new street and town. The mailman chuckled when he handed it to me; even though it was coming from an adult man, it was addressed to simply “Mom.”

“That you?” he asked.

“That’s me” I replied.

We both smiled.

That’s how it is when you are a mom. You are just “Mom.”

We tend to forget that our mothers have other names. That they existed before us, as people we never knew. We rarely ask about the dreams they had, rarely see them for who they were before they belonged to us.

There is a favorite picture I have of my mom, before she was my mom, back when she had another name. Back when she was just herself. In the picture, snapped at just the right moment, captured forever, freeze framed and frozen in time, blurred around the edges, is a fearless girl with her whole life in front of her on the back of a flying horse. Bareback, with the wind in her hair.