Mommy's Day Thoughts - For the Kids

It's Mothering Sunday in England today.  Commiserations rest of the world, you'll have to wait for yours two months later.  But in these waters, people traditionally congratulate mothers, mommies, mums and mummas for a job well done.  I remember my own Mommy, for all that she was to me and my siblings.  But I also want  to mark the day by giving thanks for being in turn, a Mother myself.

Motherhood has been called civilisation's oldest profession.  Came from one bite of the apple, and nine months later baby apples started to fall not so far from the Tree (albeit from that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and thereby hangs every mother's tale).   Make no mistake, we Mothers are professionals. Professional nurses, first aiders, human pacifiers, general all-purpose fixers, educators, gourmet short order cooks, domestic engineers, project managers (be it a pasta bridge, an original music score based on the theme of Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, a state of the art solar system presentation, or a 21st all-out bash), chauffeurs, bodyguards, private 24/7 laundry service providers, style gurus, personal assistants, public relations officers, spin doctors, agony aunts, cheerleaders for Team You, psychoanalysts, counsellors -  in fact brokers for all your ambitions and desires.  We are your life coaches who offer our services for life, your life, for free.  And none of us would have attended the University of Mommydom to qualify for all those roles.  We didn't even have a Dummies Guide To..., maybe just a dog-earred copy of Doctor Spock for our bedtime reading, if we could stay awake long enough to read more than the same two lines.  No, we are the supreme, daring-do brigade who winged it, flying by the seat of our do-I-look-big-in-these-since-Baby pants.  And a good number of us concurrently held down full time jobs outside Baby/Toddler/Obnoxious Teenager/Emerging Know-It-All Young Adult World.

It's a gift, or 2.1 gifts, or the cheaper-by-the-dozen twelve gifts if you are a mommy so blessed with adored progeny.  Some of us would have fallen into the role by way of matrimony, but I'd wager that most of us chose to be a mother. Sorry kids, you didn't choose us;  we chose you!  You are our dreams come true, dreams carried for nine whole months, and still carried till the end of our natural lives.  For you, we willingly grew 4 dress sizes up and at least the equivalent in bra sizes, swallowed that shock each day in the mirror, to afford you every room-and-board luxury for the duration of your tenancy in utero.  For you we resisted our favourite things:  chocolate, spicy food, unpasteurised cheese, booze, sex, or becoming the supermodel we'd always known we were meant to be.  Some of us still retain saggy reminders of your leasehold thereafter, and smilingly recalled the pleasure of your daily company in those early days of our relationship. We have never known a deeper intimacy with any member of the human race.

It is because of you that we reached the edges of our boundless stores of patience, creativity, pain thresholds, and physical/emotional/mental endurance.  But it is also because of you that we have touched the seventh heavens of unnamable bliss: attained the ultimate sense of worth,  job satisfaction, and the Mother of Joy (pun pun) as a meaningful existence on this earth.  No one but us will know the loneliness of the wee small hour feed, and how we somehow overcame it. We understand exactly what it feels like to never get enough sleep, and yet be able to operate heavy machinery with an albeit robotic smile plastered on our school run faces.  Our generosity has extended to never knowing privacy in the bathroom until you were aged 9, when YOU evicted us from your ablutions;  or when we've absentmindedly cut up our grown-up dinner companion's food on rare outings to adult evenings.  We've received hands-on training as expert tightrope walkers on the high wire act of knowing when to let go of the bicycle as you gained enough momentum to not crash into that poor tree, again, in the park.  Or when to shut up about your love life adventures, or lock our family saloon doors, tolerate the stench and rising damp from unwashed 3 day old rugby kits - so we can have that heart to heart about the birds and the bees (cringe factor a thousand for me too, child!).  When your heart broke over some worthless piece of humanity, you had no idea that my heart had been in shreds for months, mutely watching you suffer - and I still managed to make your favourite comfort foods to keep you going.  You didn't know how I wanted to let off fireworks from our rooftops when you finally saw sense to leave said dreg of humanity.  And you'd have no idea how we felt watching you finally waltz down an aisle we once trod - the agony and ecstasy of cutting apron strings - and what we saw beyond that altar: our hopes that you'd somehow overcome all our mistakes, and come up trumps as we'd once dreamed we might.

That was how we grew - from the green, sopping wet miseries of baby messes who hadn't a clue, to the savvy, all-nodding, all-knowing institutions who represent your nature, nurture, source of comfort, solidarity, faithfulness and hope in the ultimate, altruistic goodness of mankind.  Nothing could give us more satisfaction than seeing you establish yourselves in your own right.  I give thanks today that mine have managed to attract significant others, built a home, found non-Mickey Mouse jobs, and retained their health without me force feeding cod liver oil and dark green veggies.  And in time to come, they will know the blessing of becoming parents themselves, to discover the hard won moments when they could truly appreciate, and celebrate, being a Father, or a Mother.

So a Happy Mothers' Day to the mommies dearest, takes one to know one.  And thank you kids for the ride. I won't be the woman I am today without you.

#G8ful