Viva Terlingua, JJ, to you as well. It's Mother's Day.
I'm fortunate in that I have my Mom as well as my mother-in-law and the mother of my two children all in my life. The first two ladies have put up with a lot of stuff from their own children as well as the ones their kids dragged home and without whom my existence would be far more hypothetical than actual, ;-).
I think my wife needs a new mirror and maybe that's what I should have gotten her for Mother's Day. In the mirror she currently has, she sees what thirty years of life with a loon with a flair for career self-immolation has brought her and what raising two children born in one culture but growing up in another can do for the lines on her face, the corners of her mouth and her state of mind. Especially when you do so much of it by yourself because the man you married is still sorting out who he is. She's being way too hard on herself. I can clearly see, without my glasses, the most beautiful woman in the world and I cannot imagine her as anyone else, ever.
When my wife told me she was pregnant with Patrick, our oldest, I was so taken with 'becoming a father' it took me forever to realize the woman I had loved and married was also becoming someone else-someone who could better prepare our son and later our daughter, Michelle, for the world. I remember all the small shopping excursions to map where every element of the nursery could be purchased (she was reluctant about buying anything before the births, the tug of cultural superstition being what it was), the calculations and deliberations on what to buy, how many of it to purchase and where to store it/them, and my complete failure to accurately imagine how our lives would change with the birth of a child.
Man smart, Woman smarter especially in my case, and thank goodness for that. I can remember Patrick at five or six, clutching a toy in the Wallau Toys "R" Us in West Germany (they now have 55 stores in a reunited Germany; I'm envisioning Geofffrey in Lederhosen and the image is disturbing), walking past me to ask Sigrid if he might be allowed to take it home and after she agreed and he'd placed it in the cart, I said to him, 'hey buddy, you could've asked me-I'm your Dad, you know.' And he agreed tthen added, 'but she makes all the decisions' and continued walking down the aisle.
It's true and more than about toys and I wouldn't want it any other way. My wife has treated skinned knees and broken hearts, has reviewed countless hours of homework assignments, repaired 'but those are my favorite jeans' so expertly the kids across the street thought they were store-bought and not only gave us a family, she made us a family. Probably as true in your house as well, my two children and I look to my wife as the fingers on the hand look to the thumb. I can never accurately portray who she is and convey what she means to me.
So today is the day we officially celebrate the wives and mothers we love with the help of the greeting card folks, the candy companies and all the florists (and now there are candy flowers, edible arrangements-talk about shortening the distance) and if we're very lucky, they know we know that one day is not enough--and a lifetime together is still so often too little.
-bill kenny
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