Mother's [Guilt] Day

I have mixed feelings about Mother’s Day.

Sure I don’t have to cook and the kids make cute cards and gifts and my husband looks at me through half-closed glazed-over eyes at the end of the one day a year where he does everything I usually do the other 364 days and tells me how amazing I am and that there is no way on earth he could possibly do what I do.  Sure there’s that.

But whether all of that outweighs the guilt associated with Mother’s Day is in question. 

 

I hear an ode to the mother who never raises her voice.  I read praises for the mother who prepares a hot dinner every night for her children.  I see the moms whose children always wear matching socks.  I stare open-mouthed at the moms whose teenagers smile at and are actually willing to acknowledge their mothers in public.

It would be one thing if I was the only person who heard and noticed these things - but my kids do too. And my kids know from very personal experience that I match exactly zero of those descriptions.  I yell when provoked to the extreme, serve sandwiches for dinner, am hugely unsuccessful at helping my kids find matching socks, and have been known to introduce myself to my teenage children in the mall – the ones who follow me at a two store distance, pretending that they’re shopping alone.  

Do my kids lament my imperfections as much as I do?  How often do they wish they had a different mom?  Mother’s Day can be a good time to get some of those questions answered.  Via cards and gifts.  Here are the answers I got this year.

5 yr-old-son:  Drew a picture that his preschool teacher had made into a plate.  He had carefully drawn and labeled pictures of himself and me, standing side by side.  Then he wrote:  I (HEART) Dad.

8 yr-old-daughter:  Hand-wrote and illustrated a card.  Outside:  MOM!  Inside:  Thanks for giving me birth.  You’re the best mom . . . EVER!  She also painted a flower pot & planted ivy in it.  Unfortunately, all of the dirt and ivy spilled out on her way home from school, so we’ll be replanting.  Or using it as a pencil holder.

10 yr-old-son:  Designed a PowerPoint presentation with hearts & smiley faces & happy mother’s days all over it.  Wrote several poems and messages on the large letters MOM that had been cut out of pink paper.  A few highlights:  I’m glad you’re my mom because your very fun.  And you got me most of my stuff and stuff to survive.

13-yr-old son:  Hand-lettered 3 personalized coupons.  (1) 1 Free Favor to You.* (2) 40% off my dinner jobs.* (meaning I can give him 40% fewer chore points for that job), and (3) Free Babysitting.* In very small print at the bottom of each coupon:  *May not be combined with any other offer!*  I clarified, “So this means I can’t give you more than one coupon on the same day?”  “Yep.”

15-yr-old daughter:  I was feeling sad at the end of the day because she hadn’t given me a gift or a card.  But when I thought about it, I remembered that she:  gave up going to the lake with her best friend on Saturday to go to a painting class with me, woke up early on Sunday morning to mix roll dough for our dinner which represented a monumental sacrifice of sleep for her, cleaned the bathroom, and asked my husband to take her shopping to buy me a gift  (at 10 pm Saturday night, which is why it didn’t happen).  Her Mother’s Day card and gift looked a little different, but she gave them to me nonetheless.

I yell sometimes, we have sandwiches for dinner, matching socks are a rare commodity at our house, and I have an additional two thousand seven hundred and ninety-six mothering faults.  Give or take.

But my kids seem to love me anyway.

I guess the cards and gifts and accolades do outweigh the guilt associated with Mother's Day.  Just barely sometimes, but at least the scale is tipped.