America just celebrated Mothers’ Day. Or, as I call it, National Order Take-Out Day. We eat off plastic plates using plastic utensils—because doing the dishes would be asking too much—and bask in our generosity.
Oh, and we honor our mothers.
It’s an interesting holiday. We essentially say: Mom, I know you carried me for nine months before doing the equivalent of pushing a bowling ball through a nostril. So here’s some flowers I picked up on my way over here that will be dead by Wednesday.
Thanks, Mom.
I would have also splurged on a card—after all, corporate America is much more emotionally equipped to express my feelings than I am—but weekly therapy sessions aren’t cheap. Don’t worry, Mom, that’s mostly Dad’s fault.
But there are some gifts money can’t buy. And this year, I made the ultimate sacrifice for my mother: I went to church with her. Before you roll your eyes, it’s 9:00 AM church. On a Sunday, no less. And all my suits managed to shrink over quarantine. This was no easy feat.
I am glad I went. I was happy to learn that a member of my childhood congregation is still clinging to the same hairpiece he had a couple decades ago. The only better example of enduring to the end is that my mother still calls me her son.
We also had the chance to reminisce during the service. When the Primary took the stage to pay tribute to the ward’s mothers via hymn, my mother reminded me of the time when in the same circumstance I hurdled the railing to exit the stand (Mormon vernacular for stage). Ya know, just in case you were looking for an example of what I put her through. Not to mention she had five other kids sharing similar genes.
The addage “by their fruits ye shall know them” was never meant to apply to mothers. It’s not my mom’s fault things didn’t work out with me. She was the John Stockton of mothers. I was the Greg Ostertag of children. Any part of her infinite goodness she tried to pass onto me slipped through my fingers like an eff bomb once slipped through her lips when I really screwed up.
But that’s what makes mothers so effing great. Their love is perfect even when they aren’t. They so desperately want us to live up to our potential that their best intentions can bring out the worst in themselves.
And that’s ok.
Because one day we realize we were just a means to an end. We were nothing but a trial run for their ultimate objective—being a grandma.
Grandmotherhood offers them the joy we couldn’t deliver and gives them plenty of opportunity to hold themselves accountable for mistakes they made as a parent, usually in the form of correcting our parenting—even when we’re employing tactics we learned from them. After all, they tell us, they don’t want their grandkids turning out like their kids.
Fair point.
Mothers come in a variety of forms—single moms, married moms, stepmoms, foster moms, working moms, stay-at-home moms and many others. And while their circumstances may vary, they all have one thing in common—they are all the best.
Mine is just a little more best, results notwithstanding.
