February 8, 2026

Today I have officially lived more days than my mother ever did. It seems like a morbid thing to mark. I couldn’t help but calculate it out, and then acknowledge it. It is strange to think everything from now on is, in a way, bonus.

She died when I was so young, and it felt taboo to ask or speak much about her. It is strange raising children without her. It hurts to not have her to lean on. It hurts to not have them know her, or for her to know us. Over the years I have begun an excavation to fill some of those gaps and understand the person who I’m missing out on. Turns out I am very much missing out - she was nothing short of a total boss bitch awesome human being. I want to be more like the person I understand her to have been.

On this strangest of milestones, the beginning of the rest of my life, may I present to you, some of my findings:

• She loved loudly, ferociously, and with audacity.

• She was the “bad” older sister who drank and smoked and got into trouble growing up.

• She played the flute and twirled a baton in high school band.

• She made and maintained bffs from childhood.

• She was “the one that got away” to her high school sweetheart (he used her name instead of his wife’s at one of their grandchildren’s christenings decades later!).

• She caught frogs out at the lake and would cook and eat frog legs.

• She was a prolific letter writer whenever she travelled (often keeping a journal as well).

• While in university, she saw a cute guy through her apartment window - he was in the apartment across the street. She invited him over to hang out by pointing at him, then his guitar, then gesturing to “come on over”. He did and they became good friends.

• She moved to Nova Scotia with her bffs with no job secured and just figured it out. She got a job at Clearwater Lobster - a start up at the time. She and her friends viewed an apartment one morning and were moved in and grocery shopping that night. 

• She got a tattoo on a whim - a butterfly on her hip. She described the tattoo parlour as smelling like Listerine because that’s what they used to sanitize things. 

• She left her job and new life in Nova Scotia to move back to small town Saskatchewan because one of her bff’s mother was deathly ill. She stayed in her hometown until after the funeral, then they all made their way west. 

• She wanted a job so badly one time that she told them she’d work for free for the first two weeks - if they didn’t like her they’d get two free weeks of work, and if they did then she’d get the job. Guess who got the job?

• At a different job, someone quit and she was offered their job as a promotion. She told her boss “I’ll take the job and the promotion, but if you yell at me the way you yelled at her I’m not going to put up with it.”

• She didn’t want to talk about anyone else’s kids until she had kids of her own - then she got it and wanted to talk about kid stuff all the time.

• She originally planned to go back to work after I was born, but after a couple days of me crying at daycare drop off she couldn’t take it and decided to stay at home instead.

• When I was only a few months old, on a stretch of Saskatchewan highway, she flipped our car (barrel roll, not end over end). She and I were fine but my Dad wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and stayed with the car instead of coming to the hospital (messed up his back for the rest of his life).

• She was strict but fair.

• She had a wonderful smile that shone through her eyes.

• She was loud and bossy (like me).

• She didn’t take shit from (nearly) anyone (not like me).

• She enjoyed her work and was quite good at it, but knew the other things in her life - family and friends - were so much more important.

• When she got sick, she wanted Drew and I to be in the house as much as possible, and to be allowed to play. She wanted to be able to hear us playing.

• She loved loudly, ferociously, and with audacity.