I've been a mother for a long time (to me, anyhow), 16 years to be exact. When my two oldest boys were little, they proudly presented me with their perennial Mother's Day creations made in school, toiled over meticulously and then stuffed in a bookbag for the bus ride home, sometimes sobbing over the wrinkles and rips their gifts had suffered. I treasured each and every one of them, no matter how tattered and torn, because I knew they were made with love.
These marvelous tributes to Mom stopped with the boys leaving elementary school and walking through the doors of middle school and later high school, and my heart ached over not getting those ripped and wrinkled masterpieces. I had to acknowledge the fact that my babies were growing up and I was getting old(er).
Some years later, I married and became pregnant, twice back to back, and a few months after that my husband's 2 young daughters came to live with us, bringing our number to 8. We've tried to make our new family happy and nurturing, to give all of our kids the best chance at a bright and successful future and, for the girls, to try to ease some of the pain of their past. Of course, I was ecstatic at my "second chance" to surround myself with little ones. No one ever suspected that the fatigue and muscle weakness I was experiencing, at the time only irritating, was the beginning of the rapid decline that would eventually lead to my diagnosis of MS. Everyone, however, suspected that the horror from the girls' past would continue to haunt us and it has, casting a shadow and eating a hole in our lives in a way that no disease ever could.
Today is Mother's Day. Today, besides the flowering cherry tree given to me by all of my kids (with help from Dad), I received gifts from my girls. My 3-year-old proudly pulled from her bookbag a wrinkled and smashed poster she made at school for just this day. My 6-year-old gave me a poem with her handprint, to remind me of how small she once was after she has grown into her own life. My 7-year-old gave me a card listing the reasons she thinks I'm the best mom and why she loves me so much.
It refreshed my heart, my spirit, my well-being, getting these works of art that had flowed through their tiny fingers as their love for me found its way out of their gigantic hearts, tattered and torn in just the way I like them, and somehow they remind me of myself: No matter how wrinkled and broken I become, my children love me anyhow, because that's just the way love works.
I've come full circle, and the tree planted today in my honor will grow and thrive and stand as a testament to what it really means to be a mom.
