So it's that time of year again

where I'm sad and I don't realize why until I discover it's April. April 10th is that birthday that I had wanted to make the best. I wanted to make it so fantastic that it might have been impossible to make it as good as I'd hoped. And it is at this point where someone who has lost a loved one tells someone else, anyone else, that they should do everything to make every moment the best with their living loved ones. Well it's a dumb request because it's not in our nature. We know we need to make every moment count but we forget. And then we remember and then we forget and then we remember. We'll tell a loved one to go to hell, and then it dawns on us that we shouldn't have done that. And that's the struggle. That is love. the struggle is love. Because if you're not willing to struggle...

It's true. People say marriage is a bitch or whatever but you're in it because you don't mind struggling for this person. But you have to know that love is not A struggle; it is THE struggle. It is that YOU DO struggle.  Children, for example.

That's what I remember with my mom. Sitting there at that stop light outside of Fort Collins, the bandage wrapped around her head. It looked like a beanie on top of a kid. She was such a small woman. Petite but powerful. And often just with a smile. I told her that I wished I could do more for her and she sat quiet and smiling. Smiling. This might have been her seventh brain surgery after the last six were supposed to have done the trick. She told me she liked watching her kids live. She liked following our advenures. Is that enough? For moms, I think, maybe. For others, I'm guessing, that we don't fully comprehend the magnitude of average events. But mom's appreciate their true scale. Her daughter moving. Her son alive. They appreciate it with fear and loathing and love. And by appreciate I mean swallow the whole jagged scenario and mull it into a billion pieces. So even just a day--the sun rising and setting and that space across the sky--in her son's life, unemployed, sweat dripping down his forehead because he doesn't have air conditioning. The western sunset of Portland's hottest summer searing an ancient brick apartment building. He's nearing the end of what would be 10 months in the city, yet it was only a few weeks ago that he realized most of his neighbors were heroine addicts. He's just sitting there dumb and wondering what he's doing with his life.

Even that.

Mom's appreciate it. They see the good. Well, first they realize with naked nerves the terrible, and then come around on a carousel with the good. They army crawl through the heartbreak, but that's part of the appreciation.

Or so I'm left to wonder.

Life is that moment. Life with someone; life apart from somebody. Life is the struggle.