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Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day. It’s next Sunday. I don’t get too excited about Mother’s Day, for myself. I think I’ve done the job I set out to do and I probably couldn’t have done it alone. No, wait a second, I know I couldn’t have managed being a mother without a lot of help from LOML, my County friends, and my family.
Everyone has a Mom. For me, motherhood 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—but only figured that out many years after the fact. I wonder how many women think they had to be “Hallmark Greeting Card Moms”. I sure as heck wasn’t a greeting card mom, but I’m a mom.
Hallmark Moms were all perky, combed and sassy. Apparently they were strangers to poopy pants, barf and wee. 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. Greeting card Mom wasn’t like any of the moms I knew. Nope. My mom never wore a frilly apron over a flower-printed dress. My beautiful mom was a real person. She wore shorts in the summer and dungarees with rolled-up cuffs 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 pregnancy. Don’t get me wrong, my mom was a styling 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 cheek to ask my mom why she didn’t dress like Patty’s mom. Mom’s answer didn’t really surprise me, “Patty’s mom only has one dirty kid to clean up after. I have seven.” Ah, Mom, seven kids and that was the only time I heard you snap about the number of 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 alive, clean, wellfed, 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. That kid loved me, just the way I was.
When my mom was putting in her final days, 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, playing her favourite songs and just being with her, I thought about 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 that monster of a wringerwasher and all the clothes she hung outside on the line. I daydreamed 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. 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 our safety.
One day isn’t enough for anyone who “Moms”. One day is just a drop in the bucket. Honour the mom in your life, every day.
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