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When you become a mom, you have dreams of sleeping in on Mother’s Day while your partner and kids make you the perfect French Toast breakfast and bring it to you on a tray with flowers and a nice glass of juice. You have visions of cuddling that adorable, sweet-smelling baby who rarely cries and when she/he does, of course your mother’s intuition leads you to know exactly what’s wrong and how to make everything better. What you do not expect is the demands for juice or a diaper change. You don’t expect to be searching your house at midnight for the tiny plastic dinosaur toy that your child lost and cried herself to sleep over. And you don’t expect Mother’s Day to be just another day filled with laundry, a trip to the store for poster board for the newest school project, and demands for more cookies. But for many moms, that is exactly what Mother’s Day is—just another day. We don’t do some elaborate breakfast in my house. We don’t go out for some big meal. I don't take the day off to lay in a hammock. We just treat it like another day, perhaps with a card or gift and a hug to say “I love you.”
Although I really value the thinking behind Mother’s Day—recognition of your mom and everything that your mom has done for you—I think that part of being a mom is turning every day into Mother’s Day. It’s easy to get bogged down by the constant demands that come with being a Mom. You spend hours cleaning stains out of your kids’ clothes or folding their laundry and no one even notices that it’s done (unless a favorite shirt hasn’t yet been washed and then it is a catastrophe). Each day you help with homework, chauffeur your kid to soccer/baseball/gymnastics/dance practice, and make it home just in time to put a meal on the table and then do the dishes. Or you work an 8 hour day and rush to the grocery store to pick up essentials on the way to pick your kid up from aftercare, never stopping to relax and take a minute to wind down. It is easy to feel unappreciated and overwhelmed by the demands of every day living.
But that is why part of being a mom is finding ways that your kids show that they appreciate you every day. When my kid claps with glee and says “Good job Mommy!” when I go down the slide after she has, I know that means that she is happy that I am playing with her. When my daughter kisses my throat when I have laryngitis to make my boo boo feel better, I know it means that she knows that I make her feel better when I kiss her boo boos. When her face lights up if I give her a bowl of grapes and she says “Thank you Mommy!!” I know that she appreciates the time that I took to go to the store and get her her favorite foods. When she demands that I drag my weary body off of the couch and pick her up to dance to the "Hot Dog" song on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse after I’ve worked a 9 hour day, cooked a meal, and done a load of laundry, I know that means that she likes the way that I make a fool out of myself to turn our house into a dance party. Mother’s Day is all about being appreciated for everything you do, but I don’t need some fancy breakfast or taking the day off to lay around to show me that. I just need to look for signs of it in my daily living to turn every day into Mother’s Day.
