Maps Written in Music: A Caboodle Full of Memories (Blood Brothers, Broken Hearts, and the Soundtrack of Growing Up)

Lauren Nixon-Matney • May 6, 2026
Maps Written in Music: A Caboodle Full of Memories (Blood Brothers, Broken Hearts, and the Soundtrack of Growing Up)


Film(s): My Girl & My Girl 2

Elton John: Tiny Dancer 

The My Girl 2 Soundtrack

Maps Written in Music: A Caboodle Full of Memories

(Blood Brothers, Broken Hearts, and the Soundtrack of Growing Up)




I don’t remember the first time I heard My Girl by The Temptations.

I don’t remember the first time I wore a mood ring or climbed into the car for another humid Texas road trip, a book in my lap and music humming through the speakers.

But I remember how it all felt… like the air itself was made of stories waiting to be told.


I was the kind of girl who lived half in the real world and half in some other one,

the one where best friends made blood pacts by the lake,

where crosses around your neck were promises you never broke,

where grief was something you didn’t understand yet, but could feel brushing against you, soft as the back of a hand.


When I first met Vada Sultenfuss, she didn’t feel like a character.

She felt like someone I already knew.

Maybe because I was already a little strange, a little too interested in death and poetry,

maybe because I already knew what it was like to live between laughter and something heavier.

Or maybe because My Girl didn’t just tell a story…

it handed me a mirror, and it whispered, Here you are.


There were days when the air in Texas felt so thick it was hard to move through,

hot and heavy.

There were days when you could smell the storms coming before they broke open the sky.

But mostly, there were days that blurred together like a worn-out mixtape 

days full of bikes and dusty roads and half-wild dreams no one else could see but you.


I was always writing.

Always carrying a book.

Always listening for songs that felt bigger than the radio could hold.


When My Girl found me, I didn’t know it was going to be a lifelong companion.

I was still too young to understand how rare it is to see yourself reflected back through someone else’s story.

All I knew was that Vada Sultenfuss didn’t seem like just a character.

I couldn’t explain it exactly but she seemed like a part of me I’d forgotten somehow or just hadn’t yet met.


She lived in a funeral home.

I spent my childhood visiting my mom’s friend John Reynolds, whose family owned the funeral home in Madisonville.

I can still see the cool hush of the hallways, the strange comfort of it,

death lingering close but not terrifying yet, just part of the furniture.


Vada made blood pacts.

I learned how to do the same with Travis out by the lake,

picking at scabs and laughing at the way skin could carry promises.


Vada didn’t fit neatly anywhere.

Neither did I.


Some days the world felt too small for how much I felt.

Some days it felt too big.


I watched her on that screen 

messy, fierce, confused, stubborn 

and something in me like a missing piece snapped back into place.


And somewhere softly echoing behind it all,

there was music.


Bad Moon Rising crackling through car speakers on the way to the next small-town adventure.


My Girl spinning out of radios, of jukeboxes, of memories I didn’t know were writing themselves into me.


One of the things I loved about My Girl,

was that it felt familiar.

Not just because of Vada or Thomas Jay

but because of Harry.


Dan Aykroyd was already such a legend in our house…

the Blues Brothers, SNL, The Coneheads, Ghostbusters 

he was almost like part of the background music of my childhood.

My dad loved him.

We all did.


Seeing him play a quiet, fumbling, aching father…

someone doing his best, even when it didn’t look like enough felt so heartwarming.


I loved My Girl so fiercely because, in my mind it didn’t just mirror parts of my childhood.

It honored it.


Somewhere between the smell of wet grass and the sound of old songs pouring out of car windows,

I started to understand that life could slip away when you weren’t looking.


When I first watched My Girl, I was still on the safe side of grief.

Travis was still alive, one of my very best friends, my blood brother, the boy who taught me how to pick a scab just right,

how to press it against someone else’s and swear something that felt bigger than anything we could name.


He taught me how to fish by that same water,

we spent our summers running wild, laughing, believing in things that seemed so close yet so far away.

Magic. Healing. Forever.


When Thomas J. died in the movie, I cried 

but I didn’t know yet what it really meant to lose someone who still had mud on their shoes and stories left to tell.


That would come later.


It came too soon.


When Travis died (cancer, not bee stings)

it broke something inside me that My Girl had only brushed against.

Suddenly, Vada’s heartbreak wasn’t just a scene in a movie.

It was the shape of my own heart, trying to make sense of a world that didn’t keep its promises.


After that, every time I watched My Girl, the colors shifted.

It wasn’t just a story anymore.

It was a map of a place I’d been 

where loss lived next to love,

where blood brothers didn’t always stay.


Not long after Travis was gone, other parts of my life started rearranging themselves.

My parents’ marriage was already on unsteady ground,

and soon my dad moved first to Houston, then to Louisiana.


There were so many road trips after that, my dad, my brother Bobby and I.

driving through sticky Texas heat into the swampier magic of Louisiana summers.

I rode in the backseat with a book in my lap and songs in my head,

learning how to lose places the way you lose people…

slowly, piece by piece.


And always, there I was writing.

Writing poems, writing stories, trying to catch the things I couldn’t hold with my hands. (Or recreate some version of Harriett The Spy I was hyper fixated on at the time!) 

Trying to build a place where the people I loved could live a little longer.

I didn’t know it yet,

but I was growing into the next part of the story…

the part where the world gets bigger and messier,

where you start to chase the ghosts of the people you never really knew,

where you try to figure out who you’re supposed to be when everything you thought was solid starts to shift.


The part where My Girl would become My Girl 2.


After loss, the world doesn’t go quiet.

It just gets heavier.


You still hear the same songs on the radio.

Still feel the sun baking your legs against the car seat.

Still wake up to summer mornings and the smell of coffee and creaky floorboards.

But it all feels different like the air has been rewritten.


By the time My Girl 2 found me,

I was carrying more weight than an eleven-year-old should know how to name.


Travis was gone.

Tommy was gone.

Nanny was gone.


And somehow, even though it wasn’t the same kind of loss,

my parents had slipped away from each other, too… 

in quiet arguments and separate states,

in weekends that ended with longer and longer drives back to someone else’s house.


⸻


When Vada set out on her journey to find her mother’s story,

I understood her in a way I hadn’t understood anything before.

I was already chasing ghosts,

already trying to put together the pieces of a life I barely understood, 

the people I’d loved, the places we’d left behind,

the girl I was supposed to become.


My road trips weren’t to Los Angeles.

They were to Houston, to Lake Charles, to North Carolina,

through the swampy, sticky summers of Louisiana,

through the greener, softer summers of Greensboro.


Wherever we went, I carried my journals, my books, and my stubborn, aching hope that somewhere… 

somewhere … I would find the missing pieces.


⸻


I didn’t have a mood ring from my mother,

but I had a cross necklace from my Nanny, 

a silver James Avery cross she gave me the night before she died.


I promised her I would never take it off.


And for years, I didn’t.


When Little Dribblers basketball told me to remove it, I tried to hide it under my jersey.

When that didn’t work, I quit instead.


I watched Vada prepare to climb a fence into the tar pits for that moonstone ring,

and I knew, deep in my bones, that kind of loyalty.

The kind that says:

You will not tell me to let go.

Not of this.

Not of her.


⸻


The music changed, too, as I grew.


Where My Girl had floated through the air when I was a kid,

My Girl 2 brought new songs, songs that felt heavier, wiser, more complicated.


Our House — that bittersweet, aching portrait of a family trying to hold it together with normalcy and laughter.

Doctor My Eyes — that desperate question, wondering if we could go through the worst and still come out whole.

Swingtown — the wild, reckless feeling of possibility when the world cracks open a little wider.

Tiny Dancer and Bennie and the Jets —

Elton John pouring out of the speakers while Fay cleaned the house, singing and dancing and spinning the world back into something warm and bright.


Fay was wild and beautiful, all fire-red hair, denim and laughter.

She loved Elton John, she would play his music and sing with her whole heart, with her whole voice, with her whole wide-open soul.


There were days when the world felt hard and broken,

but when Fay put on those records,

for a little while, it felt like we might all be okay.


Shelly once told Vada that a girl could never wear too much blue eyeshadow.

Fay, beautiful, stubborn Fay told me the opposite.

In her raspy, Stevie Nicks kind of voice, she said. “A classy lady doesn’t need all that. Less is more.” 


That’s one of the zany things about growing up…

you collect little pieces from all the women who love you,

even when they’re nothing alike.


In North Carolina, I learned how to lose people and find pieces of myself at the same time.


I learned that sometimes the only lifelines you get come from unexpected places 

like Eva, the friend who found me in the wreckage and made me feel less alone.


We spent long afternoons laughing in the Greensboro Science Center,

petting goats and pretending we belonged somewhere.


We spent summers cooling off at Emerald Pointe Water Park,

racing down slides and trying to forget the heaviness waiting at home.


We built tiny worlds between us 

safe places, fleeting places, made of laughter, long talks, MaryKate and Ashley mysteries, music and not-quite-growing-up.


I watched My Girl 2 curled up in my bed,

my new clearance copy from Godwin’s grocery store 

the same grocery store where, years later, the boy I would fall in love with worked in the same aisles I used to wander through,

both of us crossing invisible paths without knowing we were already part of each other’s story.


The world is strange like that.

The way it loops and braids and brings you back to the things you didn’t even know you needed yet.


The thing about growing up is that you don’t always realize when it’s happening.


You don’t feel the moment you step over the line…

from a girl who believes in blood brothers and forever promises,

to a girl who knows that some goodbyes are permanent,

to a girl who starts looking back more than she looks forward.


You just wake up one day and the world looks different.

Wider. Sadder. Brighter.

All at once.


I didn’t know then that I was already gathering pieces for the woman I would become,

in the music I carried,

in the places I loved and left,

in the stories I wrote late at night when the house was quiet.


Songs like Reason to Believe by Rod Stewart,

echoing somewhere low and sad in the background,

teaching me that sometimes love isn’t enough to fix everything,

but sometimes it’s enough to carry you through anyway.


Songs like Baby Love,

which once sounded like sweetness on a record player and now sound like something bigger, more beautiful like the soundtrack to the life I built when I became a mother myself.


⸻


When my sweet Maggie Jo was just a toddler,

barefoot in my living room,

spinning in circles with her sweet little hands clapping out of rhythm,

singing along to “Baby Love” on an old record player I felt something break loose inside me.


The way my Nanny had rubbed my back while the Supremes played in the background.

The way my mom sang along to the radio when the world was too heavy.

The way Fay spun and laughed while Elton John poured out of the speakers, scrubbing the sadness out of the corners of the house.


It all folded together in that moment 

past and present and future.


Maggie twirled, and the world stitched itself together again,

one sweet, silly song at a time.


⸻


I still have this caboodle my Nanny gave me when I was ten. This amazingly cool blue one with silver glitter, the kind of treasure that feels like magic when you open the lid.


When the silver flower clasp broke, a couple years later at my dad’s house in Houston,

it felt like losing more than a piece of plastic —

I was so upset but tried to play it so cool I was overwhelmed and even though it’s silly to my adolescent mind it felt like losing a piece of her.


But Fay stepped in, unhooked the clasp from her own makeup case, a simple sleek black one,

and fixed mine with it.


That caboodle still sits on my dresser, a star-dusted symbol of two women who loved me in different ways.

And last year, when my daughter picked out her own caboodle…

pink, glittering, ready for a thousand small treasures! 

I realized while some gifts outlast the people who gave them.

Some kinds of love never truly wear out.


When I first got married, I didn’t change my last name.

Maybe it was stubbornness.

Maybe it was pride.

Or maybe it was the voice of Vada Sultenfuss echoing in my head,

the way she planted her feet and said, “Why should I change my name? I like my name.”


I liked mine, too.

It carried my dad’s stories, my family’s grit, the part of me that felt unshakeable even when the ground moved.

Later, when Jamie and I had kids, I hyphenated it because I wanted us to share a name, but I wasn’t ready to let go of where I came from.


Now I have three children, two daughters.

Two bright, stubborn, beautiful girls 

who don’t know yet how wide and heavy and wonderful the world will be.

Who dance and sing and trust that love is bigger than loss.


I hear My Girl come on and it feels so much more meaningful now.


What can make me feel this way?

My girls.


Not just memories of a song,

but flesh and blood and laughter and tiny arms wrapped around my neck.



And somehow… 

I’m still chasing the pieces of the dreams I carried back then.

Still following the maps that music wrote into my skin.


Chasing the tar pits I dreamed of seeing ever since I first saw Vada Sultenfuss stand at that fence,

willing to dive into the muck for something sacred.




I think more than anything what My Girl and My Girl 2 were trying to tell me all along is that real life isn’t neat.

It doesn’t come with guarantees.

It breaks your heart, and then hands it back to you, stitched with scars and stubborn hope.


It’s sticky and stupid and full of moments you wish you could take back.

It’s heavy and wild and beautiful anyway.


And if you’re lucky 

if you’re stubborn enough to stay 

you find the ones worth fighting for.


You find the songs that carry you through.

You rediscover the promises you made in backyards and parking lots and hospital rooms. You learn to hold your head up and look for stars.

You find your story, messy and glittering, bright and bold, perfectly imperfect and yours.



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RESUME THE RHYTHM:

DRIFT THROUGH A CONSTELLATION OF MEMORY

Searching For Stars

Getting Your Pink Back: Answered Prayers, Quiet Signs, Bluebirds and a Business Professional Poodle (A Letter of Light for Lindsey Gurk)

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • May 6, 2026
Okay, so I asked God for a sign this week… and I didn’t make it easy on Him. I had just seen this video about asking for a sign, about how God answers, about how He delights in it… and something in me just… recognized that. Like, oh. I’ve felt that before. Lindsey, it was your video. And the second I heard it, I remembered something. I remembered a time, years ago, back in that early, foggy, pinkless season of motherhood, when I had asked for a sign too. I had prayed, really specifically… really honestly… “God, just show me I’m okay. Show me I’m on the right path.” And I asked for a blue butterfly. I didn’t see it right away. I waited. I wondered if I had imagined the whole idea in the first place. And then, not long after, life moved us somewhere new. A new place, new energy… the kind of move that feels exciting and terrifying all at once. They handed us the keys… and right there on them… was a blue butterfly. And I remember feeling that same quiet recognition. Like… okay. And then, a couple months after that, with prayers inside us building for a second child, we went to a park. One of those ordinary days that turns into something you don’t forget. And there were butterflies everywhere. Hundreds of them. Yellow, filling the air, lifting all at once like something out of a dream. And right in the middle of it… one blue butterfly. I just stood there, overwhelmed, because I knew. I knew I had been heard. Nearly one year to the day later, our second child was born. And then… life kept moving. Time passed. Things got busy. Full. Loud. Beautiful… but a little hazy, too. Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped asking like that. Fast forward. I’m sitting with my kids on New Year’s Eve, going into 2025, talking about goals and dreams. The kind of things you say out loud but don’t always fully claim. “I’ve always wanted to write.” And my daughter, so sure, so certain, just looked at me and said, “Then make it your New Year’s resolution.” And something about the way she said it… she didn’t question it. she didn’t overthink it. She just… believed it was possible. So I did. I started building something I’ve carried in pieces since I was in high school. Old notebooks, scattered thoughts, songs, memories… things I’ve never really known how to explain out loud. And for the first time, it felt like someone actually got it. So I got to work. Writing with a baby asleep on my chest… voice notes, typed drafts, music playing in the background… piecing together old memories with new ones. And I love it. I really do. But if I’m being honest… I started to wonder. Is this meaningful? Is this worth the time? Is this something good… or just something I want? And more than anything… I wanted to know if it was something God saw as good. Not just something that looked meaningful… but something that was. So I sat down, quietly, and I prayed. And I said, “God, if this is something I’m supposed to keep building… if I’m on the right path… if this is your will for me… please just show me. Give me a sign.” And I paused… because I knew I couldn’t ask for something easy. I had asked for butterflies before and blue jays have been unusually common in our backyard lately. I needed something specific. Something I wouldn’t just brush off. I looked over… and saw this little pink and white poodle sitting on my daughter’s shelf. And I laughed a little and said, “Okay God… show me a poodle.” almost sarcastically thinking… well, this one’s going to take a little more effort. But of course… Not even 48 hours later, we ran into Burlington. We were just there to grab socks and shoes for my toddler, her sandals were bothering her. Quick in, quick out. We ended up wandering a little. We’re headed to checkout… and my husband steps down an aisle, picks something up, and goes, “Okay, I know this is ridiculous… but we need this for the office.” And he had no idea. Nothing about my prayer. Nothing about the poodle. I’m barely paying attention yet. And then he turns it around. It’s a painting. Of a poodle. Not just a poodle… a poodle in a full business suit… sitting at a desk… reading a newspaper. I just… stopped. A business professional poodle, for the office we’re building together, a space where I can write. Like everything in me went quiet for a second. Because of all the things in the world I could have asked for… of all the ways that prayer could have been answered… it was that. I remember thinking, smiling, fighting back tears of joy… of course it is. Because I had asked for something specific. And apparently… He has a sense of humor. Also, just to make sure I didn’t miss it… because let’s be real, God definitely knows how to show out… the very next place we went… was Petco. And there was this real poodle. Then again. And again. Every aisle I turned… I kept running into it. And that feeling came back. The same one from before. Quiet. Certain. seen. beloved. Lindsey… Thank you so much, you reminded me to ask. You reminded me that God doesn’t just hear us… He answers. Not always in big, overwhelming ways… but in ways we’ll recognize. In ways that feel personal. Specific. Sometimes even funny… like they were meant just for us. And Lindsey… I just want you to know how much I appreciate all of what you’re doing. Your energy, your humor, the way you show up so fully as yourself… it matters more than you probably realize. You make people laugh, you make motherhood feel seen, and you bring light into spaces that can feel heavy sometimes. But there is also so much more than that… God really radiates through you. In the way you speak, in the way you encourage, in the way you remind people to keep going and to keep believing. It’s powerful. And it’s beautiful to witness. What you’ve created with “get your pink back”… that message, that reminder… it’s reaching people. It’s lifting people. It’s giving something back to women who feel like they’ve poured everything out. And that matters. It really does. I’m so grateful I came across your video when I did. And I’m really looking forward to everything you create next… especially your writing. You’re doing something good here. Keep going. Please never stop casting your light into the world… it really does break through the darkness.

You Taught Me Beauty Even When We Were Drowning in Disaster: A Letter of Light for My Mom

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • May 6, 2026
You taught me beauty even when we were drowning in disaster: A Letter of Light for My Mom Mother and daughter relationships … it’s not always simple. Ours hasn’t been. We’ve lived through seasons that were heavy. Times when we didn’t understand each other. Moments that felt bigger than either of us knew how to handle. Days that felt like they might break us! You were diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was young. Less than a year after you divorced my dad, and the same year your mom died while she was the only lifeline to our sanity. It was part of our life whether I understood it or not at the time. Looking back now, I can see that you were carrying more than I ever could have understood. Pain, loss, and things that don’t just disappear because life keeps moving forward. And still, you kept going. Imperfectly in motion… most days. I always seem to travel back in my mind to this one beautiful memory. It was Halloween, and the carnival had set up in our small town like it did every year. It had always been my favorite part of the season, that and the homecoming dance. But that year was different. We had no money. You were in bed, recovering from surgery, hurting, exhausted, heartbroken and carrying more than most should ever have to. I remember coming into your room and telling you it was okay. That we didn’t have to go. You were lying there nibbling saltine crackers, barely able to move. But you got up. You started digging through the house. Lifting chair cushions. Emptying old purses. Checking pockets. Looking anywhere you thought there might be something left behind. We found fourteen dollars and some change. And we went. We didn’t have much, but it was enough. And somehow, it became one of the best fall memories I have. You chose to get up. You chose to push through pain, through exhaustion, through everything you were carrying, just to give me those moments. You showed up for me when it would have been easier not to. And that matters more than I think you knew then. You also told me I was beautiful. I remember that too. Mornings before school, standing there in whatever version of myself I had put together, and you would look at me and tell me I was pretty. That I looked good. That you were proud of me. You grew up in a time where beauty had rules. Where thin meant pretty. Where anything outside of that felt like something to fix or hide. And even with that, you still tried to give me something softer. You tried to build me up. You taught me beauty even when we were drowning in disaster. I didn’t understand that then. But I do now. The other day, I was sitting in the bath and noticed the veins on my legs. The kind that come with time. With life. With three pregnancies. With everything the body carries. And I didn’t hate them. I actually thought they were kind of beautiful. And instead of seeing something to hide, I thought of you. I remembered being little and noticing the same thing on you. The way they looked like constellations to me. Like little lines of light. Something interesting. Something beautiful. That never changed. Somewhere along the way, the world tried to teach different definitions. But that part of me stayed the same. And I think you had something to do with that. We haven’t always agreed. We still don’t. We see things differently sometimes. We come from different generations, different experiences, different ways of understanding the world. But I can see that you were trying, even when it felt impossible, even on days when you had mostly given up otherwise. Trying to love me. Trying to build me up. Trying to give me something steady, even when it felt like we were running on quick sand! And whether you meant to or not, mostly it worked. Now I’m a Mom. And that changes everything. Not in a perfect, tied up way. Just in a way that makes things clearer. I understand things from a different perspective than I did before. I understand how much we carry. How easy it is to fall short. How complicated love can be when you are still learning to love yourself… while also trying to raise someone else! I see now how much we carry without meaning to. How things pass through us. How easily they repeat if we don’t stop and look at them. Time keeps moving. Everything shifts, even when we don’t notice it happening. It always does. One season into the next. One version of us into another. You don’t always notice it while you’re in it. All we are is dust in the wind. And still… somehow, what we give each other is eternal. What we choose to carry forward still matters. What we soften, what we heal, what we change, even a little, still matters. It ripples. I know I won’t get everything right either. I already don’t. I know there will be things my daughters will one day have to come to terms with in their own time. Things I wish I could do better. Things I am still learning. There will be things my girls will have to understand about me one day, just like I had to understand you. Hope isn’t something that just breaks and disappears. It doesn’t work like that. It comes back. It repeats. It finds its way in again and again, even when you think it’s gone. Everything moves. Everything spirals. Things come and go. But somehow, hope restores. So I hope they always know They are safe with me. They are loved. May they always have the courage within themselves to be themselves. I hope they feel understood, even when I don’t say it perfectly. I hope they grow up strong, knowing they are allowed to take up space. Not for being perfect. Not for fitting into some mold. Just for being exactly who they are. And they are allowed to grow. To make mistakes. To change. To become something new over and over again without thinking they missed their chance. Because that’s what we do. We carry what we were given. And then, little by little, we decide what to do with it. And through all of it… through everything that changed, and everything that didn’t… I hope they feel seen. And I hope they know that being human means getting things wrong sometimes. That mistakes are not the end of the story. That they’re part of how we learn, grow, and keep evolving. Just like we did. Just like we’re still doing! And through all of it, through everything we have been and everything we are still growing into… I truly am grateful that you are my mother.

With a Little Love and Some Tenderness: A Letter of Light for Becky Greer

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • May 6, 2026
With a Little Love and Some Tenderness: A Letter of Light for Becky Greer With a little love and some tenderness. That’s what it takes, isn’t it? Not just to raise children, but to shape them. To steady them. To leave something behind that lasts longer than the moment itself. We talk a lot about our mothers when we talk about who we become. And rightfully so. But there are other women, too. The ones who stand beside them. The ones who show up in the background, in the in-between, in the everyday moments that don’t seem big at the time. The ones who fill in the gaps, step into ordinary days, and leave fingerprints all over a childhood without ever needing credit for it. You were one of those women for me. I remember you as light. Summer. Baseball somewhere in the distance. Music playing with the windows down. That kind of 90s joy that felt easy and full and alive. You had the most beautiful smile, the kind that made everything feel a little more fun, a little more possible. You were creative in ways that stuck. I still think about the way you wrapped birthday presents in newspaper comics, like even the outside of the gift deserved to be part of the magic. But what stays with me most is the way you cared. I had long, thick hair, and brushing it was always a battle. Tears, frustration, the whole thing. And I can still see you sitting down with my mom, calm and sure, saying, “Liz, you’re doing it wrong,” then showing her how to start at the bottom and work her way up. Taking something overwhelming and turning it into something gentle. I think about you almost every time I brush my daughter’s hair. That small moment didn’t stay small. It kept going. From you, to my mom, to me, and now to her. That’s how you helped shape me. Not in some loud, obvious way. But in the quiet kind of way that actually lasts. I have this vivid memory I can almost still see so clearly. Like a safe place in my mind I often wander… My mom was in the hospital. It was a hard season. My brother and I stayed with different families, trying to keep some sense of normal. But I remember begging to stay at your house. I just wanted to be there. With you. With my brother. In that space that felt safe and fun and full of life. And they let me! I remember Mickey Mouse pancakes in the morning. I remember you brushing my hair, gentle and patient. I remember sitting in the living room watching the Ewok movie, just feeling… okay. Taken care of. Like everything was going to be alright, safe and steady in a way that settled deep emotionally and stayed with me. That kind of tenderness doesn’t fade. It follows you. It shows up later when you’re making pancakes for your own kids, when you’re brushing their hair, when you’re trying to create that same feeling of comfort and steadiness for them. You gave that kind of care without making it a big thing. You just lived it. Every Christmas, like clockwork. That peanut butter fudge that didn’t stand a chance in our house. My dad and I would practically race to it, hover over it like it was gold, knowing it wouldn’t last more than a day or two. It was that good. And now, not every year but close to it, I make it too. Somewhere along the way, it became part of my rhythm. Something I carry forward without even thinking about why. Something that reminds me of you and that time and that feeling. The same way I make Mickey Mouse pancakes for my kids from time to time. The same way I brush my daughter’s hair. The feeling of pure joy and nostalgia I get when I wrap my kids birthday presents. The way… because of you our family ended up with weenie dogs. Our very first one traced back to your house! It’s funny how something like that can become a such a huge part of your life, like a thread that keeps weaving through the years. How often even the smallest things are the ones that last the longest. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you took us to our first real concert. Dishwalla, The Refreshments, and Chalk Farm. I didn’t know it then, but that night unlocked something in me. A love for music that would go on to shape who I was becoming. A rhythm I’ve been following ever since. You were an incredible boy mom. Strong, fun, creative, full of life. But you were also something more than that. You were part of the village that helped raise us. Part of the constellation of women who shaped the way I see the world, the way I care for my own children, the way I move through memory and meaning now. I don’t know if people always realize the impact they have when they’re just being themselves. But I do. And I carry it with me. You left behind patterns. Ways of loving. Ways of showing up. Ways of making a child feel seen, safe, and at home. I don’t think those things ever really disappear. They just keep moving forward, showing up in new places, in new hands, in new generations. So thank you. For the love you gave so easily. For the tenderness you carried into ordinary moments and made them matter. For the joy, the creativity, the steadiness, and the care. With a little love and some tenderness. That’s what you gave. It never left. It’s still moving. It just keeps spiraling outward, finding its way into the lives it touches next.
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