Growing up in a day long now past,

A girl’s wise mother used to say,

As she kissed her on the forehead,

Looked her daughter in the eyes,

“Please, remember whose you are.”

She said it every morning,

She said it every day.

As the child became a young teen,

She was certain Mother surely meant

That she was her parent’s daughter

And they wanted her to be good.

Not to build a reputation of bad decisions,

Think carefully before she acted,

Consider the true cost of what she spent.

Steadily though she would grow

Those words were an identification,

She was her parent’s daughter,

And she didn’t long for freedom,

For her parent’s love gave her wings,

The message in her mother’s wisdom

Were the seeds of all she would ever know.

Mother wrote it in the Bible,

In the white clapboard church that day,

When her daughter was baptized,

First step on the pathway to her eternal life,

“Please, remember whose you are,”

Daughter understood she was God’s child,

She’d agreed that she was going to follow His way.

Upon the day of her marriage,

When daughter left her parents home,

It was embroidered as a quotation,

On the picture Mother had carefully sown

“Please, remember whose you are,”

She was a Christian and a Daughter,

Daughter understood she was also a spouse.

Daughter became a mother,

Engaged in many roles in life,

Then one evening in the twilight,

She held her mother’s fading hand,

And she heard from her mother,

“Please, remember whose you are.”

As Mother passed from this earthly strife.

It happens every morning,

On each and every day,

Between the breakfasts and brushing teeth,

A young mother looks in her children’s eyes,

Kisses them on their foreheads,

And they can just hear her say,

“Please, remember whose you are.”

—–dfav

9/30/2020