Sunday is Mother’s Day. I have been a mother for more than 67 years, the longest job I have ever held. It is a role that I embraced at the age of 23, and one that in all the years since has never lost its charm.

In 1948, as my first pregnancy began, I desperately wanted a son — both for my husband, who had two sisters, and for my father, who had two daughters. We needed more men in the family. In 1949, without benefit of an ultrasound to tell me the sex of the life growing inside me, I waited to decorate a space in our house for the new arrival. Pink or blue — I hardly dared hope. I delivered my son Jack in July of that year, and the joy throughout my family and my husband’s family knew no bounds.

Two years later, when pregnant again, I secretly hoped for a daughter. Every mother should have a daughter. I know that now, but I suspected it then. In April I delivered Deborah and I shopped for pink. A son and a daughter — what mother could ask for more?

Two years later I miscarried my third pregnancy. I felt sad, but I had a son and a daughter. What mother could ask for more? We continued to try for a third child. When in January of 1954 I became pregnant again, I relaxed and realized it didn’t matter whether this baby was a boy or a girl — I already had one of each.

Sarah was born in October 1955. If it is wonderful for a mother to have one daughter, it is doubly wonderful to have two daughters. This child ended my childbearing years, and I concentrated on reliving my own girlhood by indulging my daughters with dolls and dollhouses, soft stuffed animals and paper dolls. With Jack I had played with toy dump trucks and tinker toys and Lincoln logs. With Deborah and Sarah I played with Shirley Temple dolls, Wendy dolls and small Steiff stuffed giraffes and lions. I avoided toy guns and wooden swords, and felt more comfortable in the doll sections of the toy stores. All the children seemed comfortable playing together with the model trains or the homemade dollhouse.

As the years went by, I reveled in every stage of the growth of my children — babyhood, the toddler years, early schooling, adolescence. At some point I realized I would have to build another life for myself, as children have a habit of growing up and leaving home. I took up photography and photographed other people’s children. I went back to college to complete my degree and became a teacher, a job I held for 20 years. I learned to paint with watercolors, which gave me much pleasure, and then when I began to travel the world, I wrote and sold accounts of my trips to the travel sections of Sunday newspapers. Finally, I began to write for Island magazines, memoirs of my long life. I was creating another image of myself, separate from the wife and mother roles I held, but which continued to be the most important parts of my life.

In the mid-1970s my three children had moved on with their own lives, but then they all came back. Jack quit college and returned to West Tisbury to build a house and a family and a life of his own. After earning a bachelor’s, master’s and Phd, Deborah eventually also returned, built a house around the corner from us, and has raised a daughter of her own. Sarah emigrated to California and has lived there for some 30 years, but spends Christmas and every summer with us. Jack and his wife Betsey provided me with two granddaughters. So again we are a family of mostly women.

With the arrival of three granddaughters in six years, my attention again turned to family, now three generations. I began to enjoy being a grandmother almost more than being a mother — all joy and not much responsibility. I worried about dying before these little girls grew old enough to remember me. I never really knew my grandmothers — they lived in Indiana while I grew up in New York. One died when I was 10 years old, and the other when I was 13. I had only met them several times. Now my granddaughters are 25, 30 and 31, and I have known them intimately since they were born. How lucky can one woman be?

So lucky that a great-grandchild will be in my life in June.

For this mother, this will be a good Mother’s Day.