today's my mom's birthday.

this is my favorite photograph of my mom because she looks like a country singer and also because she is smiling and it is very difficult to take photos of my mom because she gets uncomfortable with that kind of focus and she dislikes having her photo taken. but my mom has the greatest smile ever and often i think my mom forgets how beautiful she is; like, if she sees a photo where she looks like herself, she just thinks it's a good photo and not really what she looks like.

my mom's first name is myla. myla ann. which is one of my favorite names of all time. but she goes by ann, so no one knows her name is myla except for the people that know my mom pretty well, and that is mostly her family because my mom is not the kind that lets most people know her too well. my mom is the kind that is really, truly wonderful at most everything but she would never ever tell you about it. she would not even say she did something that is complimented or made something that is well liked at a party because she is not the kind. usually, if my brother and i are standing next to her, we will be the ones to say she did this and did that, which is something i always felt very proud about (this is true of my dad too, he too makes most anything and everything but everyone knows because they are enormous, difficulf-to-get-around things, like houses and cars and windmills).

one of the best memories i have of my mom is when i was a brownie girl scout and i was at a girl scout field day. it was a real sunny, real beautiful florida day at a park. and we used to have this big white antique convertible car that my dad called a "lead sled" and we would drive it on occasions when we had to pile a lot of people into one car, like when we would go to the strawberry festival or something. anyway, on this brownie girl scout field day, my mom drove up by herself in this big white convertible, with the top down and her blonde hair blowing everywhere and i swear to you and all the kittens in tampa, that all the girl scouts turned and looked at my mom drive up, like she was in the wrong place or something. she looked too glamorous to be there. and all the girls kept asking me if that was really my mom so much so that i couldn't even believe that she is my mom. one of the girls in my troop wouldn't talk to me for a week because she thought i looked like a real snot leaving there with my glamorous mom (little did she know my mom was picking me up to take me to charm school because i was such a dirty tomboy).

i was pretty young then, probably eight. there are other things i specifically remember being terribly proud of, like how at girl scout camp my mom always volunteered and ran a crafts class and her classes were always the best. and on top of that, our troop would always have the best camp shirts because my mom would alter them to make them awesome. she did lots of things like that when i was a kid. she does lots of that stuff now, 


like comes up with awesome vegetarian dishes for thanksgiving and will make like 20 vegetarian dishes even though she knows i am the only one that will eat them all. she is real good about not letting people feel left out about anything,

my grandma was like that too. i still have a letter my grandma wrote me apologizing because she forgot to give me a hug when she left the house. man, it's the best letter ever. probably the most sincere, basic thing anyone has ever written to me. i have letters from my great grandma too, we were wonderful pen pals.


so here's to my mom, and to how awesome she is and how much she cares about the people she loves and everything she does to keep up the heart and soul of our family and how there is no way in the world that anything she does could ever, in a million years, be overlooked or unremembered.