Greetings Dear Ones,

It’s 5:28 am on Mother’s Day Sunday. A customer is texting me to tell me when she is available to pick up a gown I altered for her. I’m up, of course, but I resent the intrusion. Can’t we at least pretend that I am not always at work, that at 5:28 on a Sunday morning I don’t give a single ragged hoot about when it might fit her schedule to pick up her dress? I am not that tech savvy (people have tried to help me with this issue before, trust me) and my business line goes to my personal cell when I am not at the shop because, believe it or not, I sometimes leave my shop, even during prom season. And I never turn off my phone just in case one of my kids might need me. My kids are grown and gone but I’m a mother, damn it. You never know when the call might come and I will need to put on my cape and clean boots and swoop down to Boston with Band-Aids or banana bread. They’ve been gone for years but I refuse to shut down the hotline. It’s all I have left.

Don’t worry, a little early morning resentment is a good teacher. I get curious. WHY, on Mother’s Day of all days, would I even vaguely resent the idea of being available 24/7? What is this triggering? What is beneath this urge to mutter dark mutterings about a person whose first thought of the day is NOT about whether she will annoy a service provider. (What is she doing up so early this morning anyway?) I doubt she has sheep or oxen. Maybe she has a garden. (It’s raining here.) Then, it hits me.

Maybe….she…has…kids….

That would explain being up early, the need to fit personal care for herself into the thinnest margins of the day, and the utter lack of sense of “normal business hours.” I spent many years of mothering not knowing what time it was. I was lucky to know what day it was! 5:28 am might be the only minute she thinks of herself all day.

I make myself a cup of tea and light the fire while the kettle boils. A small cat jumps on my lap and begins to purr. I decide, in honor of Mother’s Day, to call a meeting of all the mothers I have been. I haven’t seen these gals in a while. The mist rises above the teacup and their faces come into view. Gosh, they look tired. There should be twenty-eight of them but a number are missing. They are still trying to recover from the day we had to have a bead surgically removed from a toddler’s nose.

“Ladies,” I announce, “Remember when you couldn’t go to the bathroom without two crying kids and three barking dogs trying to come in with you and all you wanted was just ONE frozen minute to yourself? Today is for you. This whole day is for yourself. No one is coming to visit. There is no washing crayon graffiti off your walls, no poopy diapers, no one yelling “I’m telling!!!! MOM!” from another room. You don’t have to eat all the leftover chicken nuggets because you hate to throw them away and they’ve been out too long to serve again tomorrow.

No one smiles. This does not seem like a good dream anymore.

We miss the crayon graffiti—especially when it was misspelled and the child tried to blame it on “Daddy.”

“But that’s not my handwriting! And I can spell!” he insisted.

I look around the circle of Mothers. The first are the ones who endured the pregnancy, the labor, the delivery. They look so plump-cheeked and young, bless them. They can’t wait to get a plaster cast of their baby’s handprint and to fit into jeans again. These are the only trophies they want. They have blobs of vomit in their hair made from their own breastmilk. They are spattered as if seagulls have been pooping on them all morning but they are happy. For the first time in their lives, they have boobs and they actually work.

The one who kicked the laundry down the stairs, ran away from home, and took a four-hour nap on a bench in the rain in a graveyard when her husband asked “how the last two weeks had gone” while he was away on a business trip is not sure she is invited to our circle.

“Yes,” I say. “You are still a Mother, even though you were totally exhausted and fell apart and thought you were losing your mind. You went back. That’s what counts.”

“I only went back because I had no shoes, no wallet, and no bra on,” she sniffs.

“I forgive you,” I say. “You did your best. Two weeks alone with no help and a colicky infant was no joke. You all lived. That’s what counts.”

A lot of them are weathered, silent, emotionally flat. These are the ones who homeschooled the children, took them to swim team practice daily, tried to feed them three to seventeen times a day, while trying keep a clean house, manage live goats and loose rabbits milling about, and run a small business singing to other people’s children. These are the ones who took a strong liking to scotch.

“You’re still mothers,” I tell them.

“But we were so checked out. Our kids hated us,” they say.

“You did your best. You should have asked for help but you couldn’t because you were taught to think you should do it all and be perfect at it.”

As I sip my tea, more of the mothers step forward to confess their crimes.

“I don’t deserve to be celebrated today. I slammed my own hand in the car door and broke a bone because I was so mad at that boy,” says one. “I was so addled I didn’t even see where my hand was!”

Another says, “I should have baked more cookies and read to them more. I had no idea it would all go so fast. It felt like a life sentence. I thought it would never end.”

This little party is not turning out quite like I expected. I clap my hands.

“We’re supposed to celebrate,” I say, “not mourn! No matter what we have been through, despite all the highs and lows, we love those kids to the moon and back. They haven’t turned out to be bank robbers. They can use the potty all by themselves, sleep through the night in their own beds, do their own laundry, change a tire, sew on a button, pay their bills, and even Be Responsible for their own Messes. Best of all, they turned out to be the people we love more than anyone else in the world. We genuinely adore their company. That’s a pretty good outcome, right?”

The Best.

“There were times I never thought it was possible—especially the sleeping in their own beds part. That took YEARS,” says one, shaking her head in wonder.

“How about how we could never get the Jack Russells to poop outside but there was our son, out there shitting on the front lawn for all the neighbors to see?”

“I take a little credit for how they turned out,” says the one who refused to get out of bed to rescue her stranded nineteen-year-old at 1:am. She left him sitting by the side of the road and made him call AAA instead because he never checked the fuel gauge and had run out of gas. “If words can’t teach you, experience will,” she told him. She is a real badass. “I prayed a lot that night,” she admits. “He wasn’t home until 4 and he was only five miles away.”

“I took them to church,” says one. “I read to them every day,” says another. “I sang to them every night,” says another.

“They didn’t like that as much as the reading,” we all admit. “Even as babies they could tell you were out of tune and just making up words.”

“You’re still a mother,” I insist.

We all are.

We have shaped two very precious lives but not as much as loving them has shaped our own.

“Ladies,” I say, “We’ve done, become, and been a lot that we could never have experienced without this specialized on-the-job training called Motherhood. It’s a job whose roles include being promoted to Supreme Court Justice of the Kingdom, then demoted to unpaid consultant. Our “Job” was to put ourselves out of a job. And we did. Ultimately, this means doing our best to behave normally when they make decisions for themselves. It means painfully witnessing them ignoring all our practical wisdom yet taking on all our anxieties wholesale. We’ve had to stand by and observe them becoming versions of ourselves that alternately make us cringe in pain or weep with pride. We’ve had to look at ourselves, see what is loveable, forgive the rest, and sneak a little chocolate when we could.

What a chance. What a choice. What a Mess. What a Blessing.

To the young mothers out there, slugging it out with the boobs and body fluids—hang in there. Ask for help as often as you can. Forgive yourselves now for being tired, tempted, sneaky, or crabby, and wanting a little time on the toilet all by yourself. It’s ok. Your obsolescence is on its way. Time will deliver it faster than you could ever imagine.

And it won’t be as good as you think. Trust me, there is no loneliness like having food in the fridge that stays where you put it.

Here are some warning signs to look for: You will know your children are grownups when they say things like “I think I will go to bed early. I did that last week, and it was incredible.” They ask for recipes for the things you could not bribe them to eat in childhood. They start checking the weather. They call to check on you, instead of the other way around.

These are signs that civilization will continue and you, Dear One, have been a part of it.

For the rest of us, there is still Mending we can do! Mend ON, Mothers and Menders! Thank you dearly for your Good Work. (And your not so good work too. It was Good Enough.)

With Sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy