Mother's Day is kind of funny. Not ha ha funny, but an odd little effort to honor a role that roughly 80% of women over 40 hold. It's good there's a day dedicated to mother's, I guess, but I'm not sure how special it is when you consider there's also a Groundhog day, a Bosses day, an Arbor day, an Administrative Professionals day, a Flag day and so on. We honor lots of things. Or at the very least we mass market merchandise to them.
What's weird about the day is it alters your expectations - it's like the get out of jail free card in monopoly. You tell yourself I can pretty much do anything I want today, it's my day. I don't have to cook, clean, make decisions (unless I want to), run errands or deal with disgruntled children today. Which basically boils down to, I don't have to be a mom today. Because mom's do all that stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying dads, kids, brothers, sisters, singles, aunts, uncles and grandparents don't do all that stuff too, I'm just saying it's definitely part of the mom repertoire of duties. So it's odd that there is a day set aside to honor mom and the way in which it's often done is to essentially take her out of the role for the better part of 24 hours. The thing is, it's hard to not do all the mom things for a whole day. Especially when the kids temporarily forget it's your day off and continue to act like you're their mom. And if our expectations are that there won't be any of the stressful mom duties and then those ugly duties call, we end up disappointed that someone swiped our get out of jail free card while we weren't looking.
Because there are dance recitals and travel baseball games planned on mother's day. There are kids who are tired and sick and cranky on mother's day. There are overpriced brunches and clogged toilets and dog vomit (actually experienced that last one today and we don't even have a dog, but we were sitting for another mom).
It shouldn't be about flowers and candy (though by God's grace and my brother and husband's thoughtfulness I got both) and trying to shirk all responsibility for a day. It should be the celebration of one of God's wonderful methods for caring for His people.
So there were ups and downs today and for a short while I was resenting the downs, but at the end of the day, I am reminded what a blessing and privilege it is to be given children to raise, nurture, guide, discipline, teach, comfort, rebuke, encourage, feed, clean and love.
And to bask in the home made cards. I hope I still get that kind when they move out.
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