Hi, everyone. Welcome to Thanks for being here. A short weekly pod to remind us of the many essential and beautiful ways we affect one another.

Every Sunday, I'll read a submission from a listener of Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Could be wedding vows or about mitzvah toast, a eulogy or retirement speech.

We believe this is the loveliest way to tap into our better selves and remember our highest values.

We encourage you to share this podcast each week with one person you love. Maybe someone you miss or need to bring closer.

Someone you want to feel your appreciation or admiration or both. This is Thanks for being here.

So a listener named Catherine sent in a toast that she wrote for her mother on the occasion of her 80th birthday and it spoke to me for several reasons.

One is because there's a strong emphasis on thank you letters and I just think they make the world go around.

But two is that I know that there are so many parents who listen to this podcast who are really in the thick of heavy duty parenting challenges.

I myself have known some heavy duty parenting challenges and I think that it's curative or restorative for all of us to remember that these children of ours will just keep growing and maturing and that it's a pretty safe bet that they will come to see that so much of our behavior and actions and choices and direction was just love in a different pair of clothes.

So as you listen, remember someday your kid might write something similar about you. Here's Catherine's toast to her mother Judith on her 80th birthday.

Happy birthday to my beautiful mother who turns the big 80 today. If you know me well, you already know how much I care about her. So thank you for indulging me while I say a few words about Judith Ivy to mark this occasion.

Judith Judy grandma is a mother to four, a grandmother to eight and a wife to one, the most energetic 82 year old on the planet, my dad.

She's also a pseudo parent and friend to many. She's packed a tremendous amount of life and joy into her last eight decades and she's not done yet. She's an Australian and American, a sister and aunt and a mother in law. She loves redwoods and roses and both traveling and sitting still.

She appreciates calendars routines and plans is a firm believer in giving back to the community and helping others and she has spent a good chunk of her life volunteering with the H H Philharmonic Society as a reader at her church and shuttling her children and grandchildren to activities.

She's lived on three continents in numerous states and is an avid hiker while she may live near the ocean and has spent years watching us as competitive sailors.

It's in the mountains where she finds peace and God after a lifetime of church going she is profoundly spiritual, which is a good thing because the rest of us heathens are honestly counting on her to pull us up.

My mom is a listener who actually listens and manages to not tell you what to do.

She may be tiny in size, but her presence has always seemed bigger to me. I think it's because wherever she goes she brings a certain energy and enthusiasm with her.

She has a way of making others feel special and heard mostly because she's genuinely interested in people and their stories.

She loves to make a connection with someone or to learn something new from them.

She starts each day with a morning ritual of tea toast and the newspaper and she loves me greatly, even though I still cannot make her a decent cup of tea.

My mom raised her family a continent away from her own while managing to maintain ties to our relatives in Australia through 60 years worth of letters, emails, photos and books sent across the ocean for nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters.

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