Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day, 2006. It has been 23 years since my first Mother’s Day. How quickly the years have flown. Cliched, yes, but true and that’s how cliches evolve. True statements repeated again and again. That’s how tradition and histories develop as well, told over and over again, passed down through the ages.

I hadn’t been ready to become a mom. I was still in college, trying to finish up on the 10-year plan. But I couldn’t terminate (what a horrible word) the pregnancy. I remember telling my oldest sister first. She surprised me with her response. She was excited! She went with me to tell my other sister, who also surprised me with her reaction. She was angry. She was married and had been trying to conceive for some time without success and here I come along, single and after one night with a relative stranger, bam! I was pregnant. I knew, it wasn’t fair, but (cliche warning) nothing in life is fair.

I spent a few days gathering the courage to tell my folks. My mother reacted in her usual way. She called me a fool and walked out of the room. My dad started crying and said it was his fault. Another surprise response. He sat me down and talked of his youthful indiscretions and that now his sins were being visited upon me. My mom came back in the room and sighed and said that regardless the circumstances, this baby was going to be a grandchild and that she was ready to welcome it. Relief.

I remember the first flutter I felt, a revelation to me of the being within. I was in my fifth month, sitting on a friend’s couch at the beach. It was faint, but I knew immediately that my baby was making her presence known. Amazing.

Four months later she made her presence known again after 15 hours of induced labor and forceps. She didn’t seem too interested in emerging, but the doctors said it was time and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was delivered at 3:15AM on a Sunday morning without much crying, just a small whimper of disapproval at being forcibly removed from her comfortable environs. She was perfect and beautiful. I was exhausted and unable to hold her, so while the doctor tended to me, the nurse took her out to my waiting family and asked my mom if she wanted to hold her granddaughter. The bond was immediate and has yet to be broken. She was grandma’s girl.

The rest is a blur. Her first pre-school and kindergarten, such a sociable, precocious little sprite. Elementary and Junior High ensued at Holy Family with uniforms and school trips and sports and sleepovers and the sociable little sprite blossomed into a young lady with a sense of style and composure. High school began and ended before I knew it. So many activities and awards and recognitions and I tried so very hard to take it all in, to remember the moments and I do remember some of them. But they’re just snapshots that float in and out of the memory now.

She went away to college right out of high school. She didn’t want to stay and go to a local college, she wanted to go and I let her. She had proven she could handle herself during the four years of high school and we both agreed it would be good. Not that we needed to be separated, but I knew from experience that holding on to her would only make her pull away harder and the separation would be much more painful than if I let her go. What’s that saying about loving something and letting it go? I know, cliche. But it was true, I let go and we grew closer.

She went on mission trips and took a break from college for a year to go off to Joshua (another blog), and then went back to college and graduated and I watched my beautiful baby girl walk down the aisle to wed her beloved. Snapshots, memories stored.

I’m sitting now in their apartment, waiting for them to get ready and we’ll go to church together. They live about four hours away and I’m fortunate to visit about once a month. It’s so much fun to watch them building a life together, looking around their cute little first apartment at their expressions of their new life. I’m still part of it, but in a different role, still defining that role, but I’m grateful to be part of their life.

I remember while I was pregnant and praying to God to bless my child. I prayed that the sins of her mother wouldn’t be visited on her, that she would be spared the grief of her mother’s waywardness. God has been so very good to answer that prayer and protect and bless her. I know she will have her own grief because that is the way of humanity. But as God was faithful then, He is faithful now and will see her through as He did for me 23 short, short years ago.

Happy Mother’s Day!