Happy Birthday Mom

I've always been one to remember birthdays. This day, that is especially true. Today, August 17, is my mother's birthday, what would have been her 73rd. Since her passing almost five years ago, I've had mixed emotions about this day.

In the first few years, I dreaded it. With a passion. Cried for weeks up until the day, not really knowing how I was going to get through it. With time, that passed, although the sting of remembrance and her being gone is still there. The third year, her birthday brought much happier news. That was the day we moved into our new home. A home, I feel for many different reasons, she helped us to be able to have. Since then, her birthdays always bring out those mixed emotions in me ... sad, of course that she's gone, yet happy for what I feel is the wonderful gift, and legacy even, that she left behind.

My mother gave me many gifts in life, that are countless and incredibly special to me. For these things and my memories of her, I am grateful -- today and always.

-- S


My mother's senior class picture
Jeff Davis High School, 1956 -- Houston, TX

One of my favorite pictures of my mom in her later years. So peaceful and calm with her recent retirement.

My mom, my brother David and I, at my childhood home in Houston.

Mom, David and I just after my fifteenth birthday party.

A lot of people say I look like my mom. One day soon after she passed away, these two pictures somehow randomly fell together in my stacks and stacks of photos. And then ... it hit me ... uhhh, yeah! I guess I do. :)

JoAnn Olivares Hernandez

August 17, 1937 -- December 7, 2005