Mother's Day

Today at Emily’s day care they had a ‘breakfast’ for all the mom’s to celebrate Mother’s Day.  Last year I got teary eyed over the gift she made for me – a butterfly picture made out of her foot prints.  it’s framed and on my desk and every time I look at it I smile.  This year, I’m not sure if she made any component of my gift but I still got teary eyed over it.  I got teary eyed as soon as I walked in the door and I saw all of the Mother’s Day swag.  I think it’s two things – it is wonderful and makes me feel wonderful to be appreciated for everything that I do for my daughter by people that don’t even know the half of what I do; they don’t live with me, they don’t see our day to day.  And it’s also the first time that I think I’ve really felt slapped with the fact that all of this appreciation is just for me this year; the commercials, the ads, in my little world it is now all me and it feels weird to not share this day with my mom.  On top of that weirdness, I feel guilty that I didn’t do more in the past for my mom.  I never knew how important this day was until I became a mom and now that my mom is gone, I realize that I didn’t do enough.

I never felt like she sacrificed much to be a mom – she stayed at home, didn’t work, drank a lot when I was a kid, took advantage of the fact that my dad wouldn’t leave (or just didn’t care if he did or didn’t, I’m not sure), and didn’t do much of anything but sit around smoking and complaining; to this day I continue to feel as if I raised myself due to the very little parental involvement there was.  But today, I realized that at least at some point she did sacrifice a lot and I don’t know if any one ever said “thank you”.  She wanted to go to college, she wanted to be an archeologist and she wanted to study ancient cultures like that in Pompeii, ancient Egypt.  But she didn’t do those things; it was rare that a woman continued school after high school back then, most got married and had babies right away.  She got  job, she married my dad at age 21 and when he thought it was more important for her to stay home and cook and clean instead of work, she quit her job at the phone company and stayed home.  My mom was smart, way smarter than I think we gave her credit for.  She was a veracious reader; she would go to the library once a week when I was a kid, get a huge stack of big books and finish them all in a week.  She would buy bags of books at book sales and she would go through them in an amazingly short time.  Her and my dad’s best friend, also an avid reader, could talk for hours about books and what they had recently read.  I wish I had taken the time to say thank you more often because, even if I will never be thankful for the childhood I had, if she hadn’t had made the choices that she had when she was younger to stay home and to have a family, I wouldn’t be here.  And for all of our struggles and our fights and the silence that fell between us when she hated something that I did, I still loved her and I miss her and I would give anything to hear her stories of being a telephone operator (she handled calls for the deaf so it was a ticket-tape machine that she worked on) and to hear her talk about Pompeii and to her hear tell me all about the things that she wants to see in ancient Italy and Egypt but never will because my father is too cheap.  Today, as most days, I miss my mom and all the little details of life that we shared – the good, the bad and even the ugly.  I even miss that.

I hope that those of you that still have your mom can take a moment this weekend and show her some appreciation for all that she has done for you and all that she will do for you in the future.  There will come a day when you can’t thank her anymore, and you can’t laugh at her stories and you can’t listen to her tell you one more time about that thing she loves to talk about that you’ve heard a thousand times and you’ve probably rolled your eyes at or at least tuned out the last few hundred times. But when that day comes, when she is no longer sitting across from a table or isn’t on the other side of the phone you will wonder why you didn’t listen harder and longer and why you didn’t ask her to tell you that story just one more time so you could remember the details, the sound of her voice, the light in her eyes and the joy that you will never see again except in your memories.