Ode to Mom

There are baby bunnies everywhere in our bushes. Every time I pull in to the driveway, a wide-eyed youngster is frozen there, wondering which way to scramble.
Where is your mother, I want to yell! Why is she not directing you to pay less attention to the clover and more attention to the four wheeled beast about to smoosh you flat? Is she off munching on my flowers, too concerned about her own needs to pause long enough to guide and discipline her baby?

I was lucky. I have a mom who cared enough while we were growing up to sacrifice her own desires and needs in order to raise happy, and relatively well-adjusted, productive children. Oh there were those lapses like when Amy was 7 and the horse knocked her into the mud and walked on her back, or when Holly at age 3 walked 2 miles alone to the local grocery store. But that, and a miniscule few other incidents were all survived and probably made us all stronger.

No one really knows how hard it is to be a mother till you are a mother. All the things that miraculously happened to feed, clothe, nurture, protect you as a child..... Mom was largely responsible for. The clean toilets were not the product of the toilet fairy showing up at midnight. Being talked to and read to from the moment your eyes opened which paved the way for intelligent thought and limitless possibilities in your world may not be remembered, but it was Mom who did that just as your neurons and synapses were connecting. Even the greatest genius in the world might not have emerged if his mom had not nurtured that tender intellect.

There is no way to properly thank a mother. My tribute to my own mom is that I consider being a mother the highest and most glorious calling on earth. Happy Mothers Day, Mom.

Proverbs 31:27-29 (New International Version)

²⁷ She watches over the affairs of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.

²⁸ Her children arise and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:

²⁹ "Many women do noble things,
but you surpass them all."