Mother's Day

I celebrate having given birth three times.  Some diapers, some milk thrown up, some fevers with worries in the middle of the night, some concerns when teens didn't come home when they said they would, some joy at seeing who they partnered with as adults, and even more joy as 2 of these sons and partners became fathers and I am now the grand-mother of 6 grandchildren.

One son asked what I'd like for Mothers Day.  I didn't have a good answer.  The other 2 sons are probably too busy to ask, and will just give me a phone call sometime in the evening.  But as the old saying goes, "what's a mother to do?"

This post is celebrating motherhood.  I look out my window and see birds who are busy making babies, feeding babies, raising their next generation.  My flower pots are full of beautiful blooms.

I was going to buy some more geraniums, because last year all of mine died during the damp summer.  But where I shopped today didn't have any small geraniums, just a huge planter of them.  I have planters.  I'm a potter, of course I've got planters!  They don't always work, as happened with the blight of last year.  But I've fresh dirt and hopefulness.  I'll keep watching for geraniums, because I love their gay red colors.  I do have one that's red, and one that's shocking pink.  I just want more.  They are so easy to bring inside in the winter and keep their blooming going.

It is about to rain, with fresh winds skittering here and there, and clouds darkening the light coming through the window.

With blended families, there are lots of children with step-mothers.  But we each only get one mother, whose womb created a sweet growing soft egg in which we could grow into babies...and then we were each on our own, so to speak.  Of course baby people are so useless at birth, they need constant care and attention.  But it can come from anyone.  That first 9 months of life is totally dependent upon one other life...a mother.  That swollen belly that somehow can shrink almost back to flatness between her hipbones...and those breasts that drip with milk when a baby cries, usually our own...but sometimes milk will "let down" to the sound of another hungry infant.  What a great design mothers' bodies have.

I celebrate my mother's life also.  She was an exceptional woman, and I don't often think of her and her struggles, or even her joys and passions.  I don't know what she was holding in the picture below, taken around 1935 of my father and mother.

I inherited a lot of her qualities...love of flowers, ability to grow many of them, love of cats, love of needlecraft, ability to cook, able to organize, able to do boring things over and over when required, able to be a hostess to give joy to others, love of games (cards especially), ability to survive when the going gets tough, perseverance for a greater goal, ability to laugh right out loud or giggle, an inquiring mind, love of mathematics, love of semantics, deeply romantic and idealistic, and sometimes knowing when to keep my mouth shut.