Happy Mother’s Day!!

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there… all of you who smiled and hugged your children for making you breakfast in bed and then spent the next 3 hours cleaning up the mess they left behind.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you step-mothers, for you are a vital part of the lives of our children and yet oft unheralded and unappreciated.  Thank you for playing mother, for doing all the crappy parts of the job and never getting the spotlight that occasionally passes by, for it passes most often over the biological mother.

Happy Mother’s Day to you mothers-in-waiting, some waiting in great pain and hope and anticipation.  You are mothers in your hearts, just waiting for your dream to be fulfilled and this day is for you to share.  Here’s hoping next year on this day, your arms or your wombs are full as are your hearts.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you fathers who are mothers, for I know you are out there (as are all those mothers who are fathers.)  You cook and clean and give baths and kiss boo-boos and give up the last piece of pie to a 3 year old with a quivering bottom lip.  You are counted amongst us mothers.

Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers of the future, the daughters of today.  You will someday rise up to nurture our next generation, to balance preschool graduations and business trips and clean floors and the unending energy of boys and the non-stop drama of girls and pay the bills and nurture your own spirit.

This Mother’s Day will be held dearly for me for the rest of my life.  This weekend, I received the best Mother’s Day gift ever (and I don’t mean the candle bought from the country store while we waited for our table at Cracker Barrel!)  This weekend, I watched my daughter graduate from the University of Missouri at Columbia, from their School of Journalism.  I gathered my family around me and we laughed and cried and wondered where the time went.

I’ve been scarce lately – I was in New York all last week and I get on a plane again tomorrow morning in addition to going out of town for the graduation in between.  If you assumed I was spent, tired, stretched to capacity, anxious, and falling short in a myriad of ways at home, you’d be right.  I just need to get through the next four days and I should be able to pull myself back out of this.

Even so, Bill and I are in a really good place right now and the home life in general seems stable and strong.  This graduation has brought up a lot of issues around our family dynamic, how my ex-husband and I coexist for our grown children’s milestones, and I just made it over a very big hurdle in that regard.

For today, I’m just stopping by to say Happy Mother’s Day.  I have cookies in the oven, a suitcase to pack, baths to give, all before I collapse for some much-needed sleep.

In other words, it’s all business-as-usual around here.