Mother’s Day

To be honest, parenting has been a bit of a grind lately in our house. Si is in a whiny and demanding phase. Anthony is sweet but clingy. The house is perpetually a mess, meals are never properly planned, we need to find and buy a house and move soon, for God’s sake, and Jeff is working longer hours than he has worked since we had kids.

So Mother’s Day loomed both as a promise and a threat. It could be a special time for us to spend together as a family, with a focus on things that would be nice for me. Or it could be a furious, special-occasion kind of grind, with Jeff feeling burdened with the expectation to properly and ceremoniously celebrate the motherhood of his wife, mother, step-mother, mother-in-law, and two grandmothers, along with the usual challenges of our daily life. The likelihood of it all falling apart in disappointment and guilt seemed too great.

The weekend was not idyllic. Saturday included fights, shopping for Jeff’s new only pair of pants (he only ever manages to have one pair of wearable pants at a time, and his current ones were stained and tearing; so much for a special outing for me), and my getting left with the kids in the evening while he went to a jazz concert with his boss. By Sunday morning, both kids’ longstanding snotty noses had evolved into full-fledged, plan-canceling colds.

It was not idyllic, but it worked. The lens of the holiday made the mundane events of the weekend seem sacred. The fights were curtailed more quickly than usual in laughter. Some measure of the beatific patience I had when Si was my only child returned. Jeff made a quick gift-buying run and chose lovely things.

A grind, but a special one. We visited all of the in-town grandmas and great-grandmas, and managed to get cards mailed out on time to those in Indiana and Iowa. I saw myself as part of a lineage of women who were all over-stretched in their time. Now the time is mine. The challenge is to relish it while it lasts.