Friends are the family that you chose, and my extended family has helped me immeasurably these last two weeks, blogging family included.
One particular email from a friend was so cathartic I thought I’d post a small portion of it here. It makes me smile each time I read it…
If the author finds out, don’t ask don’t tell! 
Now as a mother…and a fellow aries..who has had MUCH experience with wayward children, let me say this: No matter how much of a pain in the royal ass you kids were, we still loved you. NO MATTER WHAT! We may not have always LIKED what you did, may have sat there and called you stupid and ignoramises and idiots, and kept questioning you as to how you could keep doing things over and over again and not learning from them, but we
always loved you. And all our bitching and griping and pulling out our hair and yelling and screaming and silent treatments, were just exasperations b/c we had so many yrs of experience and you wouldn’t listen.
Not that we really expected you to, but you just didn’t take in what we were trying to tell you, b/c you were always so much smarter than we were.
And love you up again, and the process would start all over.One day, we figured you’d finally get it, and one day you did. And that was the day we sat back and finally exhaled, and said it was all worth it. You had finally become a wonderful, sensitive, smart, woman. It didn’t matter that we’d exchanged heated arguments…we knew your words were just frustration.
We sat in our rockers and looked at our children, and then we looked at ourselves, and we said what a good mother i was. And that, my daughter, is what motherhood is all about. You will have passed this on unknowingly to your stepdaughters, and one day they will sit in their rockers and add to this.
That is lovely, and true, and lovely.