Mother's Day

When the Offspring were tiny, Mother's Day was a festival of carefully arranged arts-and-crafts:  tiny painted handprints on innumerable items; lovingly scrawled, misspelled missives on construction paper. It sometimes included strange attempts at making breakfast and always encompassed crushing hugs by surprisingly strong little arms.  There were Mother's Day songs at preschool and grade school assemblies, where all the moms in the audience, Herself included, would smile through their fatigue and alternately be moved and secretly annoyed by both the off-key warblings and the cries of the youngest infants.   

Not that long ago, Herself was deep in the trenches of nursing, diapers, tantrums, and innumerable plastic toys.  Then, as now, the constant balancing act of work and home was frequently frustrating, and sometimes numbing.  So difficult to keep everyone satisfied, happy and peaceful. It seemed there was hardly a moment's rest.  The days crawled, and the years flew.

As the Offspring have grown, the physical demands of Motherhood have lessened proportionately to the increase in emotional demands.  Though Herself need no longer carry limp and exhausted children up the stairs to bed, or tuck a flailing and screeching toddler under her arm as she calmly hurries through a public arena, there are nevertheless equally exhausting moments with teen and pre-teen Offspring.  No mother of a newborn imagines that in the blink of an eye she will be listening to teenage angst, counseling regarding cruelty of classmates, providing information about navigating the treacherous waters of young love, or describing the mysteries of human biology and reproduction.    

And throughout it all, there are emergency school supplies to procure, a million cupcakes to bake, feverish foreheads to moisten and millions of tears to dry.

Motherhood has been hard: Herself is eternally challenged.  She tries. She fails.  She tries again.  She makes mistakes, and attempts her hardest to rectify them.  She rejoices and despairs. Her name has so often been lost behind the epithet of "Mom," that she has felt in danger of losing herself - living solely in relation to the Offspring as a mother, rather than existing in her own right as an individual.  Yet in those moments, she looks at her Offspring, and her heart is full.  She cannot imagine her life any other way. 

Thank you, Offspring, for helping to make Herself into the person she is today.