By Staff
Sunday, when she came for a visit, my middle grandchild kept asking me if I wanted her to tell me what I was getting for Mother's Day. Knowing that my daughter would not be happy that her child was going to spill the beans, I tried my best to simply ignore the question.
That is when I changed the subject and tried to get her interested in something else. It finally worked and she stopped asking.
After she left for home with her parents, I thought about her, about my other granddaughters, about my grown children, the parents of those three little miracles and about my youngest child who is still at home. It is hard to describe the feelings that come when I think about them and about being a mother and a grandmother.
Words like joy, amazement, happiness, and most of all love come to mind. There is just no good way to tell someone how becoming a mother changes you, makes you more than you ever imagined you could be.
I remember when I was expecting my first child people kept telling me my life was never going to be the same again, and they were right. Motherhood shakes up your world, turns it upside down and brings fun, frustration, and wonder into your life, sometimes in the space of a few minutes spent with a determined toddler.
This year it has been 100 years since Mother's Day was first celebrated. How many scraped knees, bug bites and nighttime frights did a mother's kisses soothe away in 100 years? Oh, and how many hours of sleep did mothers lose waiting for a fussy baby to settle down or a tardy teenager to walk through the door?
Probably millions of mothers exclaimed over macaroni pictures, water color masterpieces and humorous coffee mugs in the past 100 years of Mother's Days. Every one of them knew the item, whatever it happened to be, was only a small part of the gift they received. The real present was the thought and love that went into her child selecting it.
Once in a while when I am on a cleaning binge, I uncover wonderful gifts. I find handmade cards with crayon words written by a child just learning to form letters or a drawing of something I can't quite identify, might be an animal or perhaps a flower.
Someday when I am gone and someone plows through all the stuff I've left behind, these masterpieces will still be around because mothers do not dispose of these kinds of treasures.
I know what I should tell Allie about my Mother's Day gift if she asks again. It is what I'm betting mothers for the last 100 years would say, too. I'd tell her I already have the best Mother's Day gift of all – my children and the love they bring into my life.
By Nancy Blackmon who is a free lance writer who writes for the Andalusia Star News. Her columns may be found in each Wednesday edition.