Mother's Day 2011

This Mother's Day.

I woke up at 7 but then slept another two hours.

Abe's gift to me was to promise not to whine all day. We got about an hour. It's a start.

Ted made breakfast. The bacon got burned, and I wouldn't let anyone eat the charred bits because I don't want any carcinogen-induced cancer in this family.

This is a post I could have written. I think about our other child today, as always. I loved this post. Please read it.

It's pouring down rain right now. It usually does this on Mother's Day in Portland.

I wake up every Mother's Day since being a mom thinking about my friends who long to be mothers and aren't yet. I want to buy them all a drink because this quiet suffering is a particularly cruel form of suffering that gets ignored by most people.

No one who might be reading this blog is the one who made the dumb comment I wrote about in this post. I promise. A couple of really nice people who asked about B's bumps thought I had written about them. It was all about context. This person who asked at the yard sale about her bumps had not sandwiched her question with any form of support for our family or of Bee. Her question seemed to come out of a place of fear. One of the many reasons I love Ted: he told me that he wishes he had heard her question so that he could have answered, "Oh those bumps? That's just the plague. But I hear it's not catching." I love my husband's potential for snark.

I am a protective mother, though I hope never an over-protective mother. Abe told me that a little girl in his school told him last week that she didn't like him and that he couldn't play with her. Sigh. It begins. Kids can be mean. So can their parents sometimes. I asked him how he felt about this, and he shrugged, saying that it made him sad. She's missing out, that's all I could say.

After breakfast, we lit three candles, one for each of the important mothers in our family who we can't talk to today.

We placed a candle under a photo of Dolores, Ted's beautiful mother who I never got to meet. In the photo, she is standing with one of the old ladies in the neighborhood she took care of. We told Abe that she is in heaven now and we'll have to wait until then to meet her in person. We remember her.

We placed a candle under a photo of a young mother in Ethiopia. Abe knows her name. He has conflicting feelings about her but he told me yesterday that he misses her and wants to see her someday. We love her. We remember her. Abe lit the candle himself and placed it under her photo.

For the other mother, we will most likely never have a photo. I lit her candle and placed it next to the other two. She birthed a little girl five years ago in Gondar, Ethiopia. She is another mother I will have to wait until heaven to meet. My life is forever bound with hers. I love her. We remember her.

Mother's Day. 2011. Blessings. Pouring rain. Nourishment and quiet. Charred bacon. Whining. Remembering the heartache of Mother's Days past. Candlelight. Mama-bear protectiveness.

The hope for redemption.

The grafting four families into one, bound together by God's grace.