they don't call it mothers day for nothing.

it is not possible to really appreciate your parents. you can come to terms with them, you can certainly love them, you can intellectualize their decisions, follow their logic, try to understand why they lived as they did, raised you as they did. but even after you've got kids of your own and have reached that inevitable hand-slapping-forehead moment when the grace of knowledge washes over you like a clear mountain stream and you sympathize or even empathize with them, even then you cannot fully appreciate the people that were your parents. the reason why you cannot is simple enough - it's because you did not know them before they were parents. you can know the stories of their history, but you weren't there. you can know the family, the friends, the town, the school, you can know the environment, but you can't know them outside of the context of you+them.

no matter what your mother is to you, she was something else to somebody else beforehand. a daughter, a school chum, a teammate, a friend, a lover. whether you were a plan or you were a surprise, whether you were her first, her last, or her only, whether you were a boy or a girl, whether you lived or died, you changed her life forever.