Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. As days go, Sundays are pretty packed for us (day of rest? Hah! Not between hubby’s deacon duty, my Sunday school teaching, church service, evening service…), so I’m neither expecting to do much for my mom nor to be getting much pampering myself. For my husband to pull anything off, he’d have to try to cram one more thing in the day, and try to make it fit around the nap schedule of a toddler to boot.

But I’ve been daydreaming – what would the perfect Mother’s Day be like? I think I found an article out there that expresses it wonderfully:
“What mothers need on Mother’s Day is to have their family honor all those parts of themselves that aren’t about mothering. We want tap dancing lessons and purple bras from Victoria’s Secret. We want leather mini skirts. We want instruction in race car driving or playing the saxophone. We want our husbands to rent us a Harley Davidson for the weekend and take off with us to some little motel without the children. We want the part of us recognized that made us mothers in the first place. ” – from an article on Family Fun

Every day of my life, since February 17, 2002, I’ve been a mom. My daughter looks at me that way; much of my day revolves around that fact and its impacts upon my life. (My husband’s life is impacted much the same, to be fair.) I love being a mom, so this isn’t a moan session about that impact. But the perfect way to celebrate Mother’s Day is to celebrate the person who’s the mom, rather than the mom role. Celebrate how she’s unique, recognize that she’s a _person_ who has stretched (and may have the marks to prove it) tremendously beyond her image of who she is handle the needs of her family.

I don’t recall ever talking with my mom about whether she’d dreamed as a kid that she’d have kids of her own. I know that at the age of nineteen (almost twenty), she was married and having her first of three kids. Our mother’s day gifts to her were of the normal variety – the breakfast in bed, promise to clean our rooms and behave for the WHOLE day set. Even this year, I went with the traditional flower delivery, though I did pick to send her a live plant, recognizing that she’s got a green thumb that might appreciate seeing her azalea grow. Truth is, until she took up the hobby of painting after we kids left home, I could have told you very little about what my mom dreamed of doing or what her talents were, beyond raising us kids. Kids think of their moms as moms, not people like them. In the same way that it’s weird to run into your teacher in a department store, your mom is just your mom, even if she’s really good at being your mom. And that’s why, for this one day a year, mothers ought to be given a chance to celebrate the parts of them that aren’t tied to being a mom, and even to expose their kids to the idea that mom isn’t only confined to the role of their mother. For that matter, moms need that one day a year to remind it to themselves!