Mom

Jeez. Mother’s Day. What can a fella say that hasn’t been said already? It’s well-trod territory. We love our mothers. They brought us into this world and bypassed a thousand urges to take us out. They went through the pain of birth, something we can only imagine feels something like crashing down on the crossbar of our bike and sliding forward into the goose neck in the wreckage of another Evil Knievel inspired stunt. While one can never know the other, it’s pretty well accepted that hers hurt quite a bit worse than ours. We got blinding pain and nothing more. She got the ball, chain and glory of us for eternity as a bonus.

And no matter how old or successful we get, we remain a ball and chain. Our pain hurts our moms. We suffer. She suffers. Having kids is like re-setting your life in a way that while you thought the traumas of childhood were behind you, they return in full-force and informed by our ability to remember and inability to step in and make it all right. Loving your child means leaving them to the “normal” fears, frustrations and heartbreaks that life doles out. Loving your child then means suffering right along with them.

Sure, we also glory in their successes. In fact in the process of writing tonight, I stopped to put the kids to bed, during which, Ben, two, had his first poop on the toilet. There was rejoicing all around. He called in the ladies (his mother and sister) to allow them a glimpse of the sunken little turd.

It was a pretty nice mother’s day gift to Jana, when you think about it, that sunken, beautiful little turd.

And to my mom I say thank you for suffering along with me. Thank you for sending me back out in the world when I just wanted to hide away. Thank you for loving me when I deserved very little. I know why you did it though and it has something to do with all those sunken, little… Glory be.