Thoughts on Home

Mother’s Day

Thoughts on Home

There are moments with my family when my thoughts recede and I feel as though I’m viewing a scene through the eyes of my future self. When I’m “looking back,” the peripheral drama and frustrations fade away and I see only the visceral beauty in a particular snippet. The mental separation also brings the fleeting nature of life with little kids into sharp focus and often induces what my four-year-old calls “happy-sad tears.”

I had a few of these yin-yang moments on Mother’s Day. The first happened at 6 a.m., when the kids burst into our bedroom bearing messages, and a three-part “chapter book” (partially shown below), that stirred my guilty working-mom’s heart.

I am choosing to focus on my son’s sweet words and not this worksheet’s obvious grammatical shortcomings!
Translation: “I love you.”
I make cookies so rarely, that I think they have left an outsize impression.

Card making for the grandmothers followed, an experience I can sum up in two photos:

I guess I should be grateful that my perfectionism only afflicts one of our children.

In the afternoon, everyone was happily doing his own thing (some more obsessively than others). Listening to my costumed older son randomly belt out Stevie Nicks’ Edge of Seventeen while he put together his sixth puzzle of the day (“He was no more than a baby then…”), a heavy mist again invaded my eyes.

The final moment of intense gratitude/panic about time flying by came during a delicious dinner Mark made for my mom, my brother, and us. I forgot to snap a photo because I was too busy taking it all in.

Am I the only one who had an emotional rollercoaster of a Mother’s Day? I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories below.