Being a Mother

Late again!

I know Mother’s Day was yesterday. No matter what my true intentions are, I’m chronically three to five minutes late in getting somewhere, and at times a day late or a dollar short when it comes to acknowledging special days and events. My husband says he knows how I LIKE to do things, but it’s not that I LIKE to do things that way. Normally it has to do with trying to get too much done in too little time.

I digress…

Anyway, I really wanted to say something about being a mother and what Mother’s Day represents to me. There is nothing that compares to being a mother, and no feeling that bonds two people together as fully as the parent-child relationship. When I said that to my daughter, she said children change your life forever.

They really do. And all the changing diapers, wiping snotty noses, kissing scraped knees, washing dirty faces, helping with homework, setting curfews, checking up on their friends and the challenges that come with raising them is well worth it. A child can melt your heart when she looks at you with love, completely forgetting she was so angry with you earlier in the day that she screamed for what seemed like forever, and then gives you a hug.

Being a mother is hard. It’s a full time job that we never leave. It doesn’t matter if the kids are with someone else for a while. I remember a time when Ron gave me a weekend away. I went to the city and stayed in a hotel, but I spent a lot of my time doing things for the kids. When I called Ron to get dimensions for drapes for our son’s room, he reminded me I was supposed to be taking a break.

Mother’s Day is a day to celebrate families. It’s a day to remember all the hats a mother wears, and remember that being a MOM is like being Superwoman because of all those hats. No one does the job perfectly, but if the love is there at the end of the day, she has been successful.

Here are some photos of my family:

My mother, father, sister and me when I was a baby.

One of my favorite photos of me and our four children. It was taken at a Johnson family reunion in Florida.

My children know how important family is to me, and how much I enjoy photos of the four of them together. So for Mother’s Day one year, they did a photo shoot at the park in Glencoe and gave me a photo album from the shoot and this frame with one of the photos already inside.

My 50th birthday was celebrated about a week before Ron and I headed to Malaysia. This photo was taken at the party.

I have been truly blessed with wonderful mothers before me, wonderful children after me and wonderful grandchildren after them. Thank you!