MOTHER'S DAY 2009

Mother's Day, 2009, and I've just opened the door to find a gigantic vase filled with a magnificent array of flowers, from several gigantic pink roses, plumped and half opened, to intriguing fragile chartruese spider mums, and purple delphiniums, and tightly budded yellow irises. There is even a most unusual long-stalked cabbagey-looking flower or greenery. A tiny card is tucked in amongst the blooms, and I'm pretty sure I know the sender--or senders--as in the last few days I've had e-mails from my Corvallis kids asking me for my address.

My Mail comes to a PO Box, and hardly anyone is concerned with actual addresses on this Island. It's more like, "the first house behind the mailboxes", or "the house next to the McCleans". At any rate, this is a glorious array, and I have placed it on a now-cleared-off-dining table, having removed the assorted books and papers accumulated there in the past few days, covering most of the old pine board table, leaving me to eat at the counter, or god forbid, at the coffee table in front of the TV.

The flower arrangement is deliciously fragrant as well as beautiful, and I'm smilling as I clear off the table to prepare a proper setting for such a display. Thinking, as I proceed about these two "kids" who have dictated the tiny note which I'd retrieved and opened earlier. Here it is:

"Dearest Mom,
Happy Mother's Day!! You are truly the greatest...
"The Poetry of our Lives". Thanks so much!!!
Love, Suzanne and Scott

"Poetry of our Lives". The phrase is magnificent, like the bouquet. Poetry! Full of Color, Emotion,
Love, Angst, Fullfillment and Disappointment, Wonder and Excitment, Pain and Enchantment". (I'm thinking Disney Cruise here) But...I digress and I think back on our lives together. It was at Kapiolani Maternity Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Dec. 9, 1958, 5:30 PM-- when my first-born, Scott changed my life forever. The delivery, as I was to learn, was just the Beginning. My script changed forever. After years of being just a girl, then a woman with a husband, parents in the background, in one fell swoop I was changed into a "Mother".

I think I was not unlike our cat, Filbert who--when she was not much more than a kitten--we called her a "teen-age" mother--birthed 4 or 5 kittens under our porch. We watched her, as she observed the event, almost like it was happening to someone else, and it was obvious that she was totally perplexed with her proper role--if any--in the event.

Assuming the role of Mother means you're not done until the final curtain comes down. I don't know, maybe you're not done then, and you hover around as some kind of protective angel, making sure everyone has clean underwear on when they leave the house in the morning, and offering appropriate protection and advice when dictated by the occasion. This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some degree of truth in it.

Being a parent is the hardest job I ever had. It is also the most rewarding job I've ever had. The reward part increases as you distance yourself from the day-to-day responsibilities of the child care, runny noses, school and friends and finances and discipline. It is written in the job description: MOTHER: requires 24/7, round-the clock shifts, from birth of the child til he/she reaches age 21.

However, there were those unparralleled precious times with the three of them--all under 7--in the bathtub together, or the picture I have of us--in the Fiat convertible, the two boys carefree in the backseat, while the little 2 year old pink-dressed girl sits unbelted, totally unsafe beside me in the front seat, with my bee-hived hair flying out behind me. Money can't buy that. Nor can legislation ever take the memory away.

So I sit here in the middle--with my Mother--who I appreciate more every single day--on one side of me, and my kids--who are now parents--on the other side of me. Surely there's a word for this.....like "The Poetry of Our Lives"....I think that will do.

THANX, KIDS!