It’s Mother’s Day. A day of insanity in restaurants across North America, wherein family members attempt to show gratitude for a year's mothering in one rushed, cramped meal.
A Hallmark greeting card commercial
propaganda day that reminds us of our mothers.
Mother. That bittersweet word, packed with emotion and
memory and love and pain and everything in between.
Today I sit on a boat, blue waters lapping at the hulls,
sunshine bathing me from all sides, but my mother is a thousand miles away. My
children are even further.
Can I hug my mother with these words on a cold stark
blinking computer screen? How does one reach out without arms, to say all the
things hidden in the folds of the soul that can only be shared through embrace?
Mom I love you beyond the confines of the word.
I love you with chubby little hands reaching up, into your
smile. You are my world.
I love you behind the self absorbed gruff façade of teen
angst.
I love you as I board a plane and move away from you
forever. I watch the tears pour down your sweet face as you disappear behind
airport security, and it tears me up knowing how reckless I am, but you love me
so much.
I love you today, all grown up, seeing you clearly, for the
well rounded woman you are - scars and weaknesses and immense strengths. I
admire you and I am in awe of your countless sacrifices -s o many that were unappreciated and many more that will never be known. You are the wonder of
‘mother’.
And it all comes full circle in the most heart wrenching
way. As I sit here without the warm skin to touch or the bantering voices of my
little boys, it aches somewhere deeper than bones, in the soul of my soul.
As mother’s we are literally a vessel, a teacher, a
counselor for our children. They grow and the follow a path we can never
imagine. We will never control or keep them except within us. We have the gift
of memory, the dizzyingly gentle and vulnerable smell of our babies skin, the
look in those huge trusting eyes. We cherish and grasp at the ineffable bond
that allows us to sleep at night even when they are so far away. Even when they
have gone forever, mother or child, they are never gone to us.
Happy Mother’s Day to every mother and every child but especially
my own. I love you I love you I love you.
