Mother's Love & My New Book

The newest story in the Annie the Porcupine series is coming soon:

But I Love My Mother Too.

This is a book I never planned to write. When I wrote it, I didn't expect to share it. When I shared it, I never intended to publish it. Yet here I am with a new book about to be released in just a few short weeks.

All of my stories are personal, but this one is different. This one pulled harder at my heartstrings than the others. Maybe that's why I resisted sharing it and why I didn't want to publish it.

On the surface, it's about a card contest, a homemade Mother's Day card. But at its core, it's about something much deeper: a mother's love.

I lost my own mother in 2010. Though the grief has softened with time, I don't think anyone ever fully gets over the loss of their mom. There are still days I want to pick up the phone just to hear her voice or hop on a plane to California for one of her hugs and to hear her say everything will be okay. Other times, I can almost hear her reminding me to "put on my big girl panties" and remember who I am.

My mother was the kind of woman who would say cancer was "just a word" and not even a scary one. When she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, she met it with sheer determination: fight, fight, fight. And she did for 10 years.

Even though she has been gone for almost 15 years, she continues to teach me. During my husband's recent battle with cancer, there were days when I was consumed by fear. Fear of losing him, fear of life without my best friend, fear of what he was enduring. And then, in the middle of that fear, something unexpected happened.

I stumbled across a box of my mother's most treasured possessions: paintings, essays, and tucked inside, a homemade card I had made as a fourth grader more than 40 years ago. Holding that card reminded me that the things we create from the heart can last a lifetime. What started as a private reflection slowly became a story, a story I thought I was only writing for myself. But then Annie, the real one, begged to read it. And when Annie, Chris, and Cody all told me it needed to be shared with the world, I listened.

And here we are.

This journey has come full circle. My husband is now cancer free, but in the process, he lost his own mother. His grief reconnected me to this story in a new way, reminding me again that this isn't just Annie's love for her mom. It is about how a mother's love is forever.