Happy Mother's Day To Jane Boresen

In celebration of Mother's Day on Sunday May 12, we asked Patch readers to write a letter to their mother and let us deliver it. This is Susan Connelly's letter to her mom:

Yours is the voice in my head.

So many years now I have been watching, listening, gleaning, learning.

Before I was a mom — teaching, guiding, leading, doing, always praying — I was a daughter, a little girl loved by and deeply in love with her mom.

Our days then were marked by Romper Room, peanut butter and jelly on Ritz crackers, cuddles on the couch during afternoon soap operas and pool visits in the summer.

When I was 10 you went back to work, and I watched you navigate continuing to show up fully as the mom my brothers and I had always known while also working to embrace your new role as a high school English teacher.

Nightly dinners were still made, games still attended, Halloween costumes still fashioned from scratch, the most creative of home birthday parties still given. But now there were papers to grade, essays to read, lessons to plan, laundry that piled up. I watched as your jobs as mother and teacher were never done.

Still, always, there was love, time, presence for us.

In middle school as I felt scorn for my developing body and how it separated me from my seemingly shorter, smaller, less developed peers, you told me it would get better. You told me, “Susan, one day you will be the tallest girl in the room and still, you will proudly wear heels.”

I believed you because you said it would be so.

When I was not invited to the party or to the outing, not included by the peer I so desperately wanted to call “friend,” you told me I would be a better person, a better friend, because of the way I was treated, and I believed you.

You told me “no” many times, but when I was 17 preparing for my senior prom you said "yes" to the most striking boutique-purchased gown and those ridiculously expensive custom crystal earrings. Besides my wedding day, I have never felt more beautiful, more confident in myself than I did that night.

Your “yes” gave me that gift.

When I was 19 and Dad died, I looked to you — would you crumble? Would you collapse under the weight of it all? You did not. You kept us all moving forward, kept us living, kept us together. I watched as you took it all on and rarely, if ever, did I see you crack.

Because of you I believed we would be OK; and we were.

I watched when, at age 53, two years after Dad’s passing, you allowed yourself to fall in love again and be loved by a good, honorable man who embraced and accepted our family exactly as we were and who has, from Day 1, shown up in all the important ways we needed.

You steadied my walk down the aisle when I was 28, gifting me the most beautiful of wedding days, and you were by my side when my first daughter was born three years later. When you left to return to New Jersey, my postpartum self still so shaky and raw, I struggled to hear you through my tears as you told me it would be OK, that I could do this.

I believed you because you said it would be so.

I watched how you cared for your mom, my Nana, a woman I also loved deeply, as she progressed in dementia from living independently to assisted living and then to full-time care at a nursing home. I watched as you took her shopping, set aside home cooked meals in your freezer and later collected her laundry so that you could personally stain treat her clothes. I saw how, when she passed at age 95, you were at peace.

Nothing had gone unsaid. You had fully shown up for her.

When you were 68, Hurricane Sandy forced you from the house in which you had made a home for 41 years. I watched as a lifetime of your possessions, waterlogged by the river’s surge, piled up at the foot of your driveway, a suffocating reminder of all that had been lost. I watched as you bravely relocated to FEMA-provided housing, a small apartment situated in the former officers’ quarters of an old Army base, your beloved golden retriever by your side. And I stood in wonderment one year later, when having only returned to your house a couple weeks prior, you hosted Thanksgiving for all of us, including two new grandchildren born since the storm, as if you had never been forced to leave.

Yours is the voice in my head. The voice that reminds me I can do hard things and that, most assuredly, I will have to do hard things many times over in this life.

I look at you, and often I see all that I am not. I worry that I yell too much and am too easily overwhelmed, stressed by this journey of life and motherhood. I worry that I pay so much attention to the little things that I am getting the big things wrong. You tell me I am not, that I am getting the big things right, and I want to believe you.

I watch you as a Nana and I see that you “get it,” that you see the big picture in ways a parent in today’s trenches simply cannot. You take the time: to play the board game, to teach, to cook, to garden, to sew, to read the book, to send the care package, to show up for the game, the performance; all those little something extras that add up to so many important memories made.

I am still watching. I am still learning from your example. I do not want this dynamic to ever be upset and yet I know, most assuredly, one day I will have to continue my walk without you.

Make the next best right step. Spend the time. Love. Be present. It will all be OK.

Yours is the voice in my head; the voice that I know, the voice that I trust.

See all Mother's Day letters here.