M is for the Many Things She Gave Me

Mother's Day is complicated.  Just like being a mother (or not a mother, or longing to be a mother or really just being a woman and part of society). 

We've had the flu at our house. So my mother's day was spent changing lots of dirty diapers and hoping that I wouldn't be afflicted (fingers crossed. I have yet to succumb to the puking but I do feel a little grumbly in the tumbly). We did venture out of our sick house for a trip to visit the hubbs' mother and family. Driving home Claire started fussing.  I started singing the same songs that my parents sang to me when I was a kid and I reached my arm back to play with her.  She grabbed my finger, held it tight and stopped fussing. I had visions of Claire in high school and boyfriends and all of the amazing and hard things that are coming and I just thought, "hang on. Hang on tight."  And for a moment, singing on the freeway with my little girl holding tight to my finger everything felt right with the world.

It was lovely.

And then she put my finger in her mouth and bit me. Hard.

Turns out she's teething again.

Thank you to all of the women who have mothered me (which includes a remarkable number of women who happen to be my same age). Thank you for steering me through high school, college, boyfriends, lack of boyfriends and the wonderful and hard things that have happened in my life. I am sorry if I ever bit the outreached hand.

I was probably just teething.

My own dear mother in the matching sunglasses she bought us at a street fair