A tribute to Mom

Mother's Day is here, and I've been so busy being a mother, especially to 3-week old Cassie, that I've not had a chance to get to this post till now.

Every year I'm a mother I understand my mom a little more, I think. And I'm amazed at all she did for our family of eight, and still kept a sense of humor. This past Easter we had four of the siblings' families at her house and we spent the afternoon outside watching my two oldest brothers play big bad wolves with the little cousins. I don't remember when I've laughed so hard. I think we owe a lot to mom for teaching us over the years to just have fun together.

And I find myself, like any other young mom, using the same phrases, techniques, mannerisms, etc. as my mom. She pre-programmed me as a kid, I guess. We think we'll come up with new phrases to tell our children but after they ask AGAIN "how much longer", we realize we've just answered them the way our moms did us. (In our family that answer was "seventeen more minutes") And we don't even know we're going to do it. It just happens!
I never really understood why Mom would "suddenly" (so it seemed to me) burst out with, "Rose, stop talking!" or "Quiet down, kids!" Were we really being that loud? My little-kid mind thought not. I just assumed mom was being a grownup, not being fun. And now, by the end of the day, I've reached my noise tolerance level. I feel the desperate and urgent need for silence. My kids look at me like I'm a grown-up who doesn't want to have fun. And for years I heard Mom say she couldn't stand for us to watch Strawberry Shortcake because the characters' voices were too squeaky. I wrote it off as just a preference of hers until the other night the girls had a Strawberry Shortcake movie and asked me to watch it with them. I had reached my quota of noise for the day so part-way through I slipped off and sat in silence in another room looking at picture albums. I just couldn't take the squeaky voices on the show.

Mom taught me that if you had a fairly decent piece of furniture and some glue, WD-40 and paint, you could transform trash to treasure. And have fun doing it. We had curly-q vines for curtain rods in one room (she has several in her home now), an old broom handle for a rail on the front porch steps that just two weeks ago broke after years of service, and many random pieces of furniture that had been "rigged" and looked and worked great. Yesterday I bought a little bathroom cabinet for $5 at a yard sale that had some paint chipping on the legs. I think I can paint some vines on it and cover up the peeled parts. And if it doesn't work, I'm not out much. I'll probably still use it.

Mom has been such a needed help after each baby has been born. This time she came over every morning except Sunday, when Matt was home, for a a week and a half to tend kids, feed us, and let me catch up on rest. I feel better after this birth than any of the previous ones, and I know my Mama's help was a huge factor in that.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. This may havee been a little off-the-wall kind of way to honor you, but more people get to read about you this way. I had more ideas originally of what else I might type here, but while doing this post I've fed, changed, burped, and bounced a fussy Cassie, some of which meant typing one-handed. That makes progress slow. Moms don't get time off from being moms in order to honor their moms. We just work with what we have.

I love you and rise up and call you blessed.