Mother’s Day = Dad, Don’t Screw This Up Day

There are currently two days out of the year that bring me more anxiety than any others – Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.  I’m sure when I turn 40 and my yearly medical check up starts with a Prostate Exam that day will be added to the list, but for now these two days keep me up at night!

I’m sure Mother’s Day started out as a celebration of the hard work Mom’s do everyday to keep our lives from total chaos.  I remember the day my mom came home to find out from the neighbor that I almost (key word: almost) burned the garage down, which led to my first airplane flight the very next day to spend the rest of the summer with my dad on the road.  Now, that experienced led to a very special Mother’s Day that year as I recall, it was kinda a celebration of the fact that I was still alive and the garage continued to stand, and honoring mom for all she had done, all wrapped up in one!

Now, Mother’s Day has all this pressure added to it.  It’s funny, Mariah isn’t even my MOM, yet all the pressure is on ME!!  If there aren’t gifts, no reservation at the restaurant, and special tokens of love throughout the day, everyone looks at Dad as a total failure  For crying out loud, there’s three people in this house that are actually children of Mariah, but I feel the pressure!  To tell you the truth, I think it might have something to do with still feeling the guilt of getting her pregnant three times that adds to it!  After being traumatized by seeing the birth of all three of my children, I’ve lived with this guilt, not thinking in those moments of passion that it would end up the way it did!  And Mother’s Day is just a way to torture myself again every year.

So, I’ve bought the gifts, (with the kids, which only turned into an exercise of explaining 38 times that we were there to buy gifts for MOM, and that they knew ahead of time she wouldn’t want a Barbie Movie or a new Xbox game!) I’m making the reservations, and demanding home-made cards are finished before Sunday Morning as we’re walking out for church.  I’ll order the flowers for the Mother-In-Law, call my sisters, and spend all day praising Moms everywhere I go, and at the end of the day I hope the kids appreciate what I’ve been through because just around the corner is one of my favorite days of the year … Father’s Day!!!!!  which = Mom, Don’t Screw This Up Day!