Mother’s Day 2015

An eerie end of days sort of feeling has crept over me, infusing everything I do with some internal knowledge that everything I do is the last time I do it.  Which is actually true all the time, I just don’t always notice.  Later this month will be the littlest monkeys fifth birthday.  Five is very big.  Big enough to do so many things.  Almost every day I want to go for a long quiet walk in some woods and on mother’s day I sort of did.   Although the day was, for me, filled with a desperate clinging to the past and yet a vast and unimaginable hunger for what’s to come. 

What new story will we write together?  I have been a mother for ten and half years now.  I stumble daily.  I laugh, we laugh, I say mean things some times.  I’m never very good at routine.  Sometimes I bring snacks and water and other times dinner is very very late.  

I yell at them to be quiet in the car.  I purposely choose very short books at bedtime so that I can watch a show.  I make eggs for breakfast almost every single morning. I get lost and make wrong turns so often that my kids think it’s normal to do so.  I don’t know what mistakes I will make in the future.  Who can say?  I thought to myself, I have had two four year-old's before, I know what this is like.  But I didn't.  I didn't know what it was like to have this particular four year old at all.  Nor do I have any idea what it’s like to have an 11 year-old.  

 The best decision is one you can change later on.  And you can change anything about your parenting in the past.  I sometimes tell my friends that if I could I would not have children.  But what I mean is, I would wait until I was a little older a little better of a human.  But what I really mean is, I wish I could have been like other twenty-one year-old's.  I wish I could have dated more men.  And gone to more concerts and that when I was awake all night at 23 it wasn't because I was being thrown up on by my own child.   How could I know what I really wanted?
 

my mother's day flowers

That’s just not how it happened.  Instead I got three gorgeous, HUMONGOUS, amazing children.  Who I didn't know I wanted.  Who wouldn't be who they were or have what they have to give, if it weren't for my mistakes.  At least that’s what I tell myself, since I have no intention of not making any more mistakes.  I just think the cuddlefests, and ice cream, the surprises and all the YES makes up for the crap.  

“Chant the beauty of the good” writes Emerson.  And that’s what I intend to do, in this next chapter.  The 5 to 10, 7 to 12, 10 to 15 and 32 to 37 chapter.