Go check out this touching blog: I want my mommy!

If there's a time in life when you really need your mother, it has to be when you become a mother yourself: from the moment you find out you're pregnant, to the moment you go into labor, to the day you bring that baby home - and a million more moments. We're wired to seek advice, but we really want to know the specifics from someone who shares the closest blood bond: our mother.

Was it easy for her to get pregnant? Did she have morning sickness all day, too? How did she know the moment of labor? Did it hurt? Did she do it drug-free? Did she nurse, and did it hurt like hell, and how did she get through it? Did she want to swiffer the floor 3 times a day, and is could that be caused by lack of sleep?

The moments continue on: when your baby is running a 103 degree fever and has a barky cough, when your 2 year old throws a temper tantrum in the middle of the grocery store,  when your boy is starting kindergarten. There's a natural curiosity about our own childhoods, too - a desire to piece together the story of our own lives, but also the lives of our mothers. Was she ready to be a mom? What did she want to be when she grew up? Did she do everything she wanted to?

Some of us are lucky to have moms to ask these questions. And some of us, like Katy, lost our moms early. Her mom died when Katy was 20 from non-smoker related lung cancer, but she left a touching legacy of weekly newspaper columns, and now Katy is reproducing them on her blog, I want my mommy!

It's as if her mom left her a series of letters, giving that priceless motherly advice.

Like Katy, I lost my mom to breast cancer when I was 15. And like Katy, my mom also left some writings that are like little gifts to me now, each word precious. Through them, I can hear my mom's voice, I get a glimpse into her mind, her worldview, her optimism, and her desire to keep life as normal as possible for us kids, even as life was tested by a cancer diagnosis. And like Katy, becoming a mother myself created this yawning desire to know my mom's story, a realization that she was a person outside of being my mother.

I know, it's easy to romanticize that mother-daughter relationship. I have plenty of friends with icy relationships with their moms, or they live so far from family, or resent the advice their moms freely dispense, asked for or not.

What's your experience? How's your relationship with your mom? Did it change - deepen - once you became a mom? Do you have a new appreciation of her as a woman?