Every Mother's Day, I take a moment to reflect on the past year with my children. I think about how much they have grown and matured in the preceding twelve months. Then I marvel at how the time between Mother's Days seems to shorten every year.
When we moved here nine years ago, my daughter was just a toddler. My son was still waiting to come home from the other side of the world.
Through the years, we have commemorated Mother's Day with all the traditional array of remembrances: fancy mother's day brunches, bouquets of flowers, chocolate-covered strawberries delivered to the front door, handmade cards and store bought cards filled with thoughtful sentiments and perfect expressions of childish gratitude. The earliest cards are signed in baby scratches, then shaky block letters, then practiced cursive.
But my favorite Mother's Day memories are those that, for one reason or another, didn't follow the typical patterns of the day. Like the time at the Nashville Zoo, where I watched my kids slurping down snow cones as they argued whether the tapir had a nose or a trunk. Or the time we spent the afternoon picking strawberries, then came home to eat fresh strawberry shortcake while we watched our favorite Disney movies. Or the Mother's Day with both my children home and together as brother and sister for the first time, my family complete at last. We did nothing that year but lounge around the pool and grill hot dogs for lunch and dinner.
The years go too fast.
Where once I was changing diapers and exchanging baby teeth for money beneath pillows, I'm now counting the months until driver's permits, and high school proms, and college applications, and...goodbyes. Because I've become keenly aware of how little time I have left with them under my wings. Soon, very soon, they will be taking to the skies to follow the trajectory of their own dreams.
So before another moment goes by, I want to say thank you. Thank you to my beautiful children for the opportunity to be your mother. Thank you for filling the deepest corners of my soul with your joy and wondrous imagination. Thank you for making me a better person, a better woman, a better daughter, a better friend, a better mother than I could have ever been if both of you hadn't blessed my life.
And thank you to the women who gave birth to my children, who chose to become ghosts within their distant memories. Our shared legacy is two lives rich in love and experience and opportunity and dreams fulfilled. Though we may never meet, we are forever bound together through our children.
When we watch movies, my daughter often checks on me:
"Mom, are you crying?"
Inevitably, the answer is yes, because I cry at movies. It doesn't even have to be a sad movie; it can be a comedy with a touching moment. (Seriously.)
But give me a movie that has themes of mother love, and I am a complete mess.
Maleficent had me in tears throughout, actually stifling outright sobs when the "no truer love" scene was presented as that of a mother to her child.
Finally! I thought. Finally, someone got it right!
