Grateful (For Mother's Day)

I've been garnering a reputation as a certain kind of mom lately.  If there's a meme, a joke, or a sarcastic one-liner about hiding from your children, using wine to medicate, or hating homework, it finds its way to me.  I think these are all hilarious, by the way (so don't stop sending them).  Motherhood is a lot of those things--exhausting, want-to-bang-your-head-on-the-table frustrating, exhausting, confusing, exhausting, hard.  Did I mention exhausting? My choices are laugh or cry and most days, I chose laugh.  I find humor in my mommy-hood and our family and it's a blessing.

But I hope you all also know this:  I am incredibly grateful that I have the opportunity to be called mom.  There were a couple of years there, we weren't sure it was going to happen.  Not only have I been blessed once, but four times over.  Sometimes I just stare at my children and marvel that my husband and I made tiny little humans that run around and destroy things and talk back and are the loves of my life.  These children are walking, talking reflections of us (both our good and our bad) but all their own person at the same time.

It's a miracle.  There's no other way to explain it.

I know mine are still little but I see it with each passing birthday, with each new milestone, that they won't always be this little.  There's a constant struggle between longing for the day when they can take care of themselves and always wanting them to need me.  It makes a part of my heart ache when we light the candles up on their birthday cakes.  On those days, I find a few minutes by myself and I cry because a year is gone, a year they will never be that small again.  That year may have been the last time he wanted to hold my hand, the last time he wanted to snuzzle-cuzzle with me, the last time he needed training wheels, or the last time she called me mommy instead of mom.

A few years ago, I was at a local church selling church cookbooks.  I was there with a friend who had her sweet baby boy with her.  He still had that new baby smell, still pulled his feet up tight in a ball like he did in the womb, so tiny, so perfectly formed, so perfectly perfect (total baby fever fodder).  While we were there, a woman easily in her late 80's approached.  She was small and dainty, couldn't have been more than five or so feet tall, with dyed hair out to there (this is Texas). 

"Oh my," she exclaimed, looking right past the cookbooks and zoning in the baby, who was sound asleep in his mother's arms.  "Look at that little one."  She rounded the table a bit to get a closer look at him. "How old is he?"

"Two months," my friend replied.

"Two months," she repeated and I swear her eyes got a dreamy, far away look in them.  She smiled softly to herself and then she said words I will never, ever forget.  "I would give up everything I own, money, house, cars, all of it, to hold one of my babies like that just one more time."

What else is there to say?  Hold those babies tight.  Love on them.  Spoil them with too many kisses and hugs and I-Love-Yous.  Treasure these moments and be grateful you are called mommy.

Happy Mother's Day.