Years ago, I saw the tail-end of a sitcom that has stayed with me. I can't remember what it was called, but Diane Cannon played a California fruits-and-nuts mother (I lovingly say this while holding my "Native Californian" card) with two grown daughters. The oldest was married and had a new baby and had hoped that her first Mother's Day would be one of the best days of her life. Her husband did buy her a card and cut the grass, but it was nothing like the imagined day at the spa, giant bouquet of wildflowers, surprise oil portrait of her with her new baby, or thoughtfully dinner. Since her husband had fallen asleep watching a baseball game for the rest of the afternoon, they ended up at her mother's beach house for dinner.
I'm going to paraphrase here:
Later that evening, she bemoans to her mother, "I thought that when I gave birth, became a mother, that it would change our entire lives...spiritually; that we would truly become a family in the deepest sense of the word; that Todd would recognize that enormous change in me and in us."
(Pause. Pause.)
Her mother looks at her as though she is speaking Swahili.
"Where do you get this crap?" (Clearly, her mother is not the source of these ideas).
Sigh.
Sigh.
"I just wanted my first Mother's Day to be memorable," her daughter begins to recognize that her expectations were a bit off.
"You want memorable?" her mother grins, patting her daughter's knee. "Memorable, I can give you."
Cut to the beach (night shot), outline of the two of them, skipping/running into the surf, laughing hysterically, and completely naked. What a way to teach your adult kid how to celebrate herself! What a great gift to give her!
My image of motherhood was nothing like what it became. People talk all day long about the joys of motherhood; that it's the hardest job in the world, that there is nothing more fulfilling, blah, blah, blah. No one says what that looks like in real terms. You don't glow. Motherhood is your friend telling you that there is something questionable in you hair and you are relieved to find that it is only peanut butter. It's clenching your jaw so tightly you are certain your front two teeth are going to snap off and cause your gums to recede. It's having to change your entire outfit on Sunday morning two minutes before you have to leave, because your other shoe is at the bottom of the dress-up box (discovered well into the next season). It's being so completely covered in God's "blessings" that you miss everything He might be telling you unless some wonderful person points it out to you.
No one can tell you in advance that the most memorable moments are not those that the modern day poets blather on about in a Hallmark card or are captured in the soft filtered lens of a photographer, but they are in the most trying--the moments that no one sees except you and God. Moments like when your infant has had a fever all night and you are covered in infant urp and sweat and a part of you is desperate to put her down, shower, and get into you own bed, but...she has finally fallen asleep on your spent breast, the sheen of sweat bathing her forehead as her fever has breaks, and you sit rocking and kissing her damp head, thanking God that she will be well... and quiet. Moments like when your son finds a dead, fuzz and crud covered lollipop in the car and instead of sneaking off to have it himself, brings it to you "because I wuv you." The gratifying and heartbreaking moment when your baby goes off to first grade without tears, and most devastating; the days when your tears won't stop because she is going through her first days of college without coming home to apples and peanut butter after school...and you know she's doing just fine without them. Because they are our babies, there are times we forget that our job is to grow them to be contributing, confident adults who affect the world in a positive way and those moments are hard on us, not them.
Diane Cannon's character has snapped me into the mother I want to be on a lot occasions, but my friends are my best image of what mothers should be. Since I don't see a load of us heading into Barton Springs Pool in the middle of the night without making the internet, this is not an invitation to go skinny dipping with me, but I do want to throw some Diane Cannon light on the ideas we have realized: that life is full of rearranging your expectations and laughing it off and knowing who will welcome you, feed you, and tell you like it is--and go skinny dipping! And so, my friends, you who fill in for me, who kick my butt, who tell me that I'm doing fine, who share wine and horror and laughter and love and understanding with me--I wish you the Happiest of Mother's Days in your very own soul, that there are moments in your life that exceed your expectations, and most of all, that when God needs to speak to you, that you can hear.
