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A gathering such as this happened all over this country yesterday…

So why did ours feel especially special?

Well…if you knew how our Mother's Day gatherings were growing up you would probably celebrate right along with us!

My parents divorced when I was 9, my brothers 7 and 4 (going on 5).  We were young.  It was hard, as all divorces are.  Mother's Day is a holiday where the FATHER's take the children under their wing and help them pamper the mothers (the reverse is true of Father's Day which was also bad in our house – we'll get to that in June).  When we were young, Mother's Day cards and poems and gifts were still products of the schools we went to.  Like my own boys, we would come home for the weekend and proudly display our schoolmade wares much to our mother's delight.  But around Jr High, the teachers stopped taking ownership of Mother's Day and left us to our own devices.  This was BAD, very bad.  Because you see as teenagers we didn't know what day it was, much less what day of the YEAR it was.  We had not been properly trained in the art of Mother's Day.  We would often wake up around 10 on a Sunday morning, sometime in mid-May, and discover our mother crying in her bedroom, occasionally with the door locked.  Being the single mother of 3 teenagers is a thankless and unrewarded job.  Or some years my mom would decide NOT to wait for us to plan or organize anything and would tell us that she had made arrangements for all of us to dress up and go to brunch at the local hotel.  And we would whine, cry and pout the whole way there because it was keeping us from much more important things, like friends.  Heaven help us, it was bad.  Real bad.

And so events like this yesterday…where we all gather at my mom's house with gifts and flowers.  And where the innocent in-laws and soon to be in-laws make a delicious and abundant brunch for the mothers (thank you girls!).  And where we all lovingly praise the woman who gave us birth.  Well…first of all, it's a wonder she kept us around at all.  And second of all, it's wonderful that we can treat her as she should have been treated all along.

And so…even though moments like these happened in homes all over the country yesterday.  Ours had a touch of magic…of penitence…of forgiveness that made it all the more special.

We love you, Mom.

ps.  we've spent the last 10 years making up for all of those rotten M.Day's, and I think we've almost paid our dues (although mom insists it was never necessary, we know it really was)! 🙂