Orchid and Dotsie, I can so relate to the Mom aspect of this discussion. My Mom was the same. She was an amazing, capable, intelligent woman with an enormous generous heart (e.g., she volunteered in various hospital and community organizations several days a week from her teenage years until her early 70's.) She poured all of herself into raising her family, bearing 5 children, losing one in infancy, and then raising the 4 of us with what I now realize must have been a huge hole in her heart for most of our growing-up years.

What saddens me the most is that she and I had a very turbulent relationship, abusive in some ways, and I never had the chance to appreciate what an amazing woman she really was until much later in life. Looking back, I wish I could have taken her on trips, because she loved to travel and Dad didn't, so she rarely went anywhere...oh, she would have loved to travel through Europe or go on a cruise, or see the rest of Canada. But her entire world shrunk to the size of whatever house we lived in at the time, and those volunteer hours in the community. Was she happy? I don't think so. I saw glimpses of her frustration and restlessness, but I never really understood or appreciated her sacrifice until much later, when I realized how much bigger the world was, and how little of it my Mom had been able to experience and discover.

It is sad, when you know what's out there and see how little of it people are willing or able to experience...whether by choice or circumstance.

As I constantly struggle with my own inexplicable yearning to just curl up in my own little cocoon and never leave home, I am very grateful to have a husband who insists on traveling to new places...the more I see of this amazing world, the more I want to see, so that keeps both of us expanding our range of possibilities.