because making potato salad makes me appreciate my mom even more

Today is my mom's birthday, happy birthday mom!!!!

Last friday I made (for the second time in my life) my grandmother's potato salad for a 4th of July party on saturday. To say this potato salad is my favorite would not be an accurate description, it is the only potato salad I like (I am not a potato salad snob, I promise!). This dish was at nearly every family summer gathering when I was growing up, and nothing can compare to it, but it is a bit of a time consuming thing to make. It involves scrubbing and boiling potatoes, then peeling them while still very hot, finely dicing vegetables adding just the right amount of vinegar, layering vegis and hot potatoes, etc. So as I was making the recipe (feeling rather crummy and tired as it was 10 pm) I kept thinking about how many times my mom has made this, how many hours she spent peeling screaming hot potatoes so I could eat my favorite potato salad, and it made me love her even more.

I will give a little background about my relationship with my mom, and you will see just how far we have come.

To write a personal history at this point in my life would be quite lengthy (think novel rather than short story), even thought I am only 24 I have been through a lot, but I will provide the reader's digest version for the moment (this is after all about my mom). My parents divorced when I was 11, and the rocky relationship started then. I lived with my mom, and did not want to have anything to do with my dad, or my mom at certain points. In high school I dealt with eating disorders and depression which landed my in various psychiatric faciltities and hours of therapy, all of this I did not think I needed, and blamed my mom for inflicting it all on me. There was a point in my life where I hated my mom more than anyone else in the world. Then one day I had an epiphany, I had been wrong all along and my mother was an amazing women.

Since that momentous day, I have been continually apologizing to my mother (for anything and everything I put her through in my crazy teen years), telling her over and over how much I love and admire her (I feel silly saying it so often and in so many ways, but she deserves it), and finding new ways all the time to find a new appreciation for things she has done and still does for me. I cannot count how many times I have been in a situation with my husband or my son and thought, "Oh my goodness, I need to call my mom and apologize for ____ (fill in the blank with whatever lesson I learned)". I am continually learning new ways to love my mom, and sometimes it is in funny situations, because something like making potato salad makes me appreciate my mom even more.