My three-year-old son, Toby, wakes up and cries because he doesn’t feel like going pee pee in the potty right now. He just wants to watch his train video in his pajamas and drink chocolate milk. Or maybe he wants to see what things he can hold in the mouth of the toy plastic pliers he is waving around his bed like a villainous claw.
“Look mommy! James! They can hold James like this!” He grips James the red engine while making a squinchy, growly face. James falls loose, Toby cries again and I want to run out of the room to my bed and throw my covers over my face.
But I don’t. “OK,” I say, “You can stay in your pajamas.” I regret this when we take the pajamas off to pee pee and put them back on again in our usual slow way that makes my bones cringe in frustration.
“I need THAT mommy, get me THAT.” He runs to his closet and points at his blue piggy bank. I hand it to him before pulling baby Charlie from his room and plopping him in the bouncy seat with a bottle propped on a wad of blankets. Toby follows me everywhere clanging the piggy bank with each step.
In my bathroom I try to get ready. I let him loll around on the floor while I blow dry my hair and he finds all the treasures a mom’s bathroom proposes. An eyelash curler, a contact case lid, my wedding ring. “Oops, you can’t play with that,” I say as he tries to stuff it into the slot of the piggy bank.
“Whyyyyy?” He whines dolefully while playing with it anyway.
“Don’t you know that it is MOTHER’S DAY and Charlie’s Baby Dedication Day and I just want to look NICE at church with my hair NOT in a ponytail for ONCE. And even though it may prevent anyone there from recognizing me altogether, I just don’t care today, because it is MOTHER’S DAY and I want to enjoy living it, because I am your MOTHER.”
He blinks at me with total incomprehension and tries to hold the contact case lid in the clamp of the eyelash curler. Charlie rallies and drops his bottle over the edge of the bouncy seat with a yelp of glee.
I feel like I am somehow missing the magic of this day, and that probably all other mothers are lying in bed with a tray of pancakes festively served beside a long stem rose and steaming cup of coffee, opening construction paper cards with I Heart Mom scrawled in red crayon.
We make it unceremoniously to service just in time to march Charlie up on stage along with nine other babies for his important spiritual debut. We smile when they call his name and we kiss him and squeeze him and promise in front of the congregation to raise him to know the Lord. I look at his little bean of a body in my arms and hope that I really can do it. That my pouting over Mother’s Day and my impatience with his brother and my just imperfectness will not be all he sees in me. I hope he sees something deeper: the thousand-foot well that is my heart exploding with wild hope for him.
We sing together, our little family lined up in a row, and I feel a surge of peace when I realize I would never be enough. That even though I love my boys with an aching, relentless energy, I am NOT everything they need. If I was lovelier and every note sung from my mouth was rich and pure like buttery syrup dripping from a spoon, I still couldn’t capture the beauty of God for them. If I was stronger, and I said “no” when I should, and didn’t cry when things went wrong, I still couldn’t show the strength of God for them.
I am just their mother, someone to point the way, not be the way.
Suddenly, I don’t think myself capable of any more joy than I am bursting with today, singing “Beautiful One” loud and free in my own croaking boisterousness with my family at my side on my Mother’s Day.
This morning, if I wrote about happiness it would have been pancakes and compliance, daintily ideal and sickly perfect. In this moment, happiness is feeble and weak and wonderfully satisfying.
God help me trust them to You, my most sacred treasures.
Andi is a freelance writer and the mother of two young sons. When she is not clipping coupons, she chronicles life with little boys on her blog “Tales From the Running Mama” at www.tobyncharlie.blogspot.com.