Happy Mother's Day

I started Mom's Day the perfect way....talking to my Mom.

Our relationships with our mothers are so darn complicated. My mom has struggled with her relationship with her mother her whole life, and even dead my abuelita and Mom are still in there.....or at least my mom is. I watch friends and co-workers each have their own dance with their Mother. A continuum from love to alienation and everything in between, sometimes in the same day.

Whatever angst and mistakes were made along the way, our mothers are remarkable people.

This post is to give a big public thank you to my Mom for the love, support, and ejemplo you gave me. I'll give you all the credit for my successes and exonerate for any blame for my mistakes (generally things you told me not to do in the first place!).

I think being a mother is the hardest job you'll ever love (and sometimes hate, let's be honest here), and there is really no class or school or training or support group provided. A set up for a lifetime of regret, perhaps. We children don't really begin to appreciate this until we are adults. The jobs our mothers' took on, often without knowing fully what was ahead.

Mother's Day is a day for appreciation and also one for grieving for me. Women who've had miscarriages are the invisible mothers, and it's hard to celebrate your motherhood when the children were never born. No one acknowledges our motherhood, since it is so tinged with loss, in a society where death is erased as much as possible. I'm not talking about the daily violent death glorified in the mass media and stripped of all the grief that should accompany such carnage.

So I'm going to celebrate and grieve in my way, on my terms today.