Mother's Day - It's Complicated


I had it in my mind to write about the various internal conflicts that Mother's Day causes for me every year — in terms of loving my daughter, missing my mom, and wishing my daughter could celebrate with grandmothers. But I've written it all before, and I don't have much new to say.

But Patrick works hard every year to make it great, and I got lovely gifts, and got to spend the day with my family and not doing work, and we had dinner at Smack Shack, and that was in the end a special kind of wonderful.

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful mothers I know (and to all those with mothers — see, that's everyone!). Because really, it gets a little complicated for us all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Race?

Image
 (sign from a NOLA bar) Probably the world does not need another middle-aged, white, cisgender woman writing about race. But the world DOES need my daughter's take on it, and she doesn't blog, so here I am. When we first knew we were having a girl, we knew she would have blue eyes, because mine are blue-grey and Patrick's are blue-green. The genetics don't vary much on that one. Other than that, we thought, with dominant genes and some luck, that she might look like her Aunt Patrice. Which she actually does. Except for the tiny little issue that somehow my Nordic genes totally went dominant rogue and she turned out to be blonde and very light skinned. (age 1.5 in the Scow family christening dress) So since she's been old enough to communicate, she's had people confused about her racial identity. She's been told she checked the wrong box on forms, she's had teachers deny her ancestry, she's had government officials question her Global Entry, she's
Read more

New Year's Eve 2023

Image
I did not want to be laying in bed, wearing a fleece onesie and still shivering, while my husband and daughter headed out to the several wonderful NYE parties we have planned. I have a beautiful new dress that I got in Duluth for tonight, and was looking forward to the collection of friends we would be seeing. Our friend Whitney in particular is throwing the last party at her B and B, and it's breaking my heart not to go. But I feel logey and coughy, and more to the point, I have a low fever, and I don't want to mess around with possibly getting anyone sick. I'm still holding out hope that I'll miraculously feel better and the fever was a mistaken reading, but I doubt that. And I feel lucky to have 3 sets of people who want me in their lives tonight and who I don't want to get sick. As our yoga teacher Viv says, it's not like a page turns and everything is magic. You get some things that are good, and some that are not, and life is living in the middle. -- In 20
Read more

Choosing Happy

Image
This post is brought to you by a few thoughts from yesterday: First and foremost, Patrick's new book that he wrote for Beatrix for her sixteenth birthday. Available for a hot second before we leave for spring break tomorrow. The response of someone he knows on the internet, who wrote yesterday that he had decided years ago that he would never be happy (and reading his posts, he seems to be right.). It was one of the saddest things I've encountered in a long time. A friend's social media post, in which she discusses another person's comment of " I really think a sizable proportion of the population has become addicted to being angry" with the sage response of " I think a lot of them are doing it because it's more enjoyable to be angry than to be depressed." A nd we finally finished watching this season's Fargo last night. I won't give any spoilers, but it's extremely on theme with this post. So this is the deal. There's a lot on
Read more