Mothers Day Surprise

In the future I will not create blogs when I have the flu. They turn out to be a bit dour.
I am recuperating, too slowly, but am finally a little more lucid. I think I will try to balance these things between people and cats. Then people will have to check to see whether I’m trying to be brilliant or just recording inter-species communication.

Mothers Day happened recently. Things like Mothers Day and Fathers Day and Valentines Day and New Years Day and Christmas and Thanksgiving can be excruciating for those of us who do not live in a Norman Rockwell world.

I went to church on Mother's Day even though I think I pretty much flunked motherhood. There's a little girl (around 6 or 7 I think) who always runs to sit with me during the first part of the service. I was hoping she would be there. She was. And she ran to sit with me and, later, during the post-service coffee hour, she presented me with a small pot of petunias with a little note that said, "I love you Gram". That helped immensely.

Then a group of us went to the local sculpture park to participate in a Mothers Day 'Stand for Peace'. [Mothers Day was initiated in 1870 by Unitarian Julia Ward Howe to protest the carnage of the Civil War and encourage pacifism.] There were about a dozen of us standing next to a sculpture of a child cradling a dove. When a reporter and photographer from the local paper showed up, they actually recorded our presence and our insistence that Mothers Day was an affirmation of life not death in war.

After our ‘stand’ was over, I walked around the park on a gently warm day brimming with flowers.

That evening, around 6 p.m., my younger son Bruce called (long distance is free from his workplace) and we had a good talk. So a day that I thought would be incredibly hard turned out to be rather amazing.

May we all be open to amazing days.