My First Mother’s Day

This is going to take me a while to write.  It’ll be posted by Sunday though, so I can be on time.

This one is surreal.  I think that it won’t really MEAN anything to me until it means something to Athena.  The real joy in celebrating mother’s day is people who recognize that you’re their mother.  And while I think she thinks I’m a very nice lady that mostly helps her go to sleep, kisses her incessantly, plays with and feeds her – I don’t know if she KNOWS that “Mother” is who I am.

Plus I always had it in my mind that I would somehow be celebrating along side Mom… and maybe even Grandma.  After mom died, Mother’s Day in 2009… i basically went into hiding for the day.  I didn’t want to see any advertisements or specials on TV.  I didn’t want to walk the street to be amongst the throngs of families going to church or brunch with mothers and grandmothers.  I replayed various mother’s days in my head that I’d spent with my two mother figures all my life.  I remembered pinning red carnations on my dad’s lapel for mother’s day all my life, until that one mother’s day that I pinned a white one for him.  And he lamented the loss of his mom…  After that day, I just wrote mother’s day off.  I’d send Tante Sisi some flowers to say Happy Mother’s Day so that she didn’t feel alone.  But personally – i wouldn’t do much else.   The futility behind trekking to the cemetery and staring up at the box with my mom and grandma’s names… is empty to me.  The are NOT there. And that isn’t where I can go to visit them.  But I have no where else.  All the times we celebrated.  All the cards and balloons and gifts we’d given to celebrate who they were in our lives.  Marred with the remembrance of unearthing the HUGE envelope full of cards  — every card – we’d ever given them – after they died.  They kept every one.  And when we wrote them… we NEVER imagined EVER getting them back one day.

So although the first one… it’s bittersweet.  Just in time for mother’s day though, the cherub is practicing how to SAY “Ma”.  And for the haters / rainers on my parade.  No – she isn’t saying “Mama” and maybe it sounds more like “muuuh” than “ma”…  but it is MUSIC to me.  So. Take that.

 My sweetums first attempts at calling me by name.