Happy Mothers Day to Me

I am a mother. On Mother’s Day we traditionally pay tribute to our own mothers. But today I am going to break with tradition, and pay tribute to myself. Yep, that’s right. Because being a mother is a lovely, beautiful, complex, painful, joyous job. I am so glad I had the opportunity to be a mother.
As a mom, I had my stellar moments, moments that made me sure I was worthy of the Mommy of the Year Award. And I’ve had my epic fail moments, when I fumbled the ball so badly that I wondered if the team would ever recover. Ups and downs, highs and lows, hits and misses, it is all part of being a mom. And part of being a mom is being human, so human that we can reach extraordinary heights of awesomeness, and devastating lows in human error and fallibility.
It has been the best job of my life. And the longest, with no retirement plan. My kids have taught me so much. They drew out of me incredible resources I didn’t realize I possessed. They revealed to me things about myself that I didn’t necessarily want to know, much less admit. They made me a better person than I ever thought I was capable of. When they fell down and scraped their knees, I helped them up. When I fell down and scraped mine, they helped me up too. And then we laughed, and we loved, and we carried on, because that’s what being a mother means.
Today I write this because no matter how great a mother you are or were, there are niggling little moments along the way where you wish there were “do-overs”. But there aren’t. And gee, isn’t that a shame, because of all the things you did in life, this is the one thing you wanted to do right. Not just right, but really, really, right.
My kids are grown now, with families of their own, but I’m still on mom duty, and I’m still loving my mom job. I have the benefit of hindsight as I write this today. I can see clearly now that our kids don’t need a perfect mother to turn out great. They need a human mother, one they can grow with, stumble with, giggle with, be with. Be real with. How hard would it be to have a perfect mother, one in whose presence you always felt lesser than, one with whom you were afraid to be the real you, one to whom you always fell short? That would suck.
So here’s to me and here’s to you, and here’s to our glorious humanity, so evident in every perfectly flawed mother on earth.