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Ah, Mother’s Day. I’m on a plane winging my way to see family in the UK, on Mother’s Day. LOML takes great pleasure in telling everyone, who’ll listen, the trip is his Mother’s Day gift to me. The truth of the matter is, he also takes pleasure in telling people he doesn’t buy me Mother’s Day gifts because I’m not his mother. But, as I write this, just before Mother’s Day, I’m thinking “everyone has a mother”. Right? Of course, I’m right. In one way or another, there was a mom-person for each of us. It stands to reason it should be easy to write about the celebration of motherhood day. Shouldn’t it? For me, motherhood, from the “git-go” has been complicated but, I’m sure it is for lots of moms. I struggled with being a patient mom. I struggled with bonding. After one pregnancy I suffered from postpartum depression which was a huge nono to deal with back in the day. This year I’ve been thinking of all the people I know whose moms weren’t “Hallmark Greeting Card Moms”. I sure as heck wasn’t a greeting card mom but, I am a mom and I’m a grandmother, too. Mothering and grandmothering gets easier with experience.
Advertisers often use a perfectly coifed mom (who seems to have it all together all day), to get their product point across. Those advertisement moms are all perky, combed and sassy while they mop-up poop, barf and wee. Obviously, the creators of this parallel-motherhood-universe have never changed a loaded diaper at three in the morning. Real moms aren’t perfect. Real moms have spit-up on their shoes and baby poo under their fingernails. As a young mom, I wondered who the H E Double Diapered Bum those picture-perfect moms were. Advertising Mom isn’t like many of the moms I have ever known. Nope. My mom never wore a frilly apron over a flower-printed dress. My Mom often wore a kerchief to keep her hair under control. My beautiful Mom was a real person. She wore shorts in the summer and dungarees with rolled-up cuffs (she was quite short) in the cooler weather. Mom made her fashion statement wearing one my Dad’s old dress shirts as an apron/blouse and sometimes as a cover-up for a current pregnancy. Don’t get me wrong, my Mom was a stylish person, just not in her everyday life. As a young girl, I was a bit jealous of one friend’s mom who actually wore the pretty house dresses and crisply starched and ironed aprons. One day, I had the audacity to ask my Mom why she didn’t dress like Patty’s mom. Patty’s mom always seemed to have it together. Mom’s answer didn’t really surprise me, “Patty’s mom only has one child to clean up after. I have seven.” Ah, Mom, with seven creative and wild kids and that was the only time I heard you snap about us. Honestly, I don’t think I ever did enough to let my Mom know how much I loved her and how I appreciated everything she did to keep the seven of us clean, well-fed and semi-polite in public and at the dinner table. The first time one of my kidlets gave me a handmade Mother’s day card, I knew I didn’t have to be picture perfect. The kid loved me, just the way I was and I’ve got a crayoned drawing of me to prove it.
When my Mom was putting in her final hours, in 2008, my siblings and I spent many, many hours with her at the hospital. As I took my turn holding her hand, reading to her, singing her favourite songs and helping her with her meals (along with a few other things I never thought I’d EVER have to do for my Mom), I thought about all of the unconditional love she gave her seven children. I thought about all of the meals she cooked. I remembered all of the laundry she ran through a wringer washer and all the clothes she hung on the line. I day-dreamed about all the mending in the basket by the sofa and of all of the weeding she did in her large vegetable garden. I smiled when I thought of all of the boo-boos she patched and kissed and about the library’s worth of bedtime stories read when she probably wanted to just sit with a cup of tea, or a glass of vermouth. I wondered how many nights my Mom waited up for us when we tested the curfew – each of us thinking she was stressing about the late hour when she was really concerned about out safety.
One day isn’t enough for anyone who has active Mom Duty. One day is just a drop in the bucket. Honour the mom in your life, everyday. Thanks, Ma.
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