My Perfect Imperfect Mother's Day

I love Mother's Day; not because everyone makes it a perfect day for me, but because of all the imperfections. My Mother's Day starts the night before when, like the night before Valentine's Day, my hubby makes an emergency late night trip to the store.  This might offend some women, that their true love doesn't remember these "special" days until the night before, but it never has bothered me.  He makes so many other days special so frequently that these two dates on the calendar aren't going to tip the scales out of his favor.  I can't count the times, just in the last week in the normal course of his day, he has taken the baby so I can get a nap, washed the dishes, brushed Audrey's teeth so I can have a few minutes to myself, delivered food to my "office" while I was working because he knew I was hungry, and mediated child squabbles to help keep the peace in our home.  So, if my Mother's Day gift is a little...spontaneous, I'm really not upset.

The morning of Mother's Day is always the same too.  The kids start peeking in our room very early in the morning (inadvertantly waking me each time) to see if I am conscious yet.  Then, when they see me stirring, they run downstairs to the kitchen and proceed to make a catastrophic mess and a brilliant cacophony of noise to produce my "breakfast in bed."  This meal is usually eggs (half raw, half burnt) and a wide variety of weirdness on the side.  Today, it was yogurt, bananas, juice and hot dogs (cooked the "old-fashioned way--in the sun").  As they lay the tray over my lap, Kobe (10) exclaims, "Wait!" and runs downstairs for the shish-kabob sticks, comes back up and skewers the hot dogs, nodding in satisfaction.  I am then allowed to open all my gifts, as the kids proceed to devour most of my meal.  (After they had polished off the hot dogs, the sticks were artistically poked through pieces of banana.)  With my family all around me, a strange mixture of bizarre gifts scattered on the bed, and my husband and I exchanging barely-concealed grins at each other as the last of my eggs gets sneakily stuffed into a little mouth, I am the happiest of mothers.

As I thought back on my perfect imperfect morning, my heart ached in advance, thinking of the day when I won't have a pack of kids gathered on my bed, eating the weird food they have made for me.  I won't get my child's most precious possession as a gift, just to have them take it back again two minutes later.  I won't have sweet little hands wrapped tightly around my head as a wet, sticky Super Kiss is smooshed into my cheek.  It hurts my heart already to know that I can't hold onto this day forever.