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Thanks for sharing your story of learning to write with your mom!  I loved your description of how your mom tought you to look at letters as shapes and even pictures. Your struggle to differentiate "b" and "d" even though you knew how to "draw" them, speaks to how complicated the process of becoming literate really is.  Once you can read and write fluently, it can be hard to remember how difficult it was to make connections between tracing a letter, and recognizing it again when you saw it in printed text.  

I remember sitting beside my mom as she would write checks to pay bills or solve crossword puzzles at the kitchen table. I especially loved when she would make grocery or 'to do' lists because the writing was easier to read, freed from the confines of 'pay to the order of' lines or tiny blank boxes.   I thought her writing was beautiful, and I hoped that if I copied her lines exactly, my handwriting would be as graceful someday.  Often, If I waited patiently, my mom would print sentences for my to trace and copy.   I would watch her hands and try to hold the pen the same way she did.  I loved carefully mimicking her lines and gestures.  I don't know whether I actually thought of what I was doing as learning to "write," as much as I desperately wanted to make my letters beautiful like hers.