A Tale of Two Mother’s Days
We’re having deja vu here. Last year, we asked our kids what they thought of us. To summarize, Ellen’s kids thought she looked like this:
Erin’s kids thought she looked like this:
My Kids tell me I look like Betty Crocker
Yeah, that’s right. One of us got the better end of that stick, but nobody’s keeping score. Jealousy is an ugly thing even when you just can’t help it, and especially when Fate seems to treat one Sister like a princess and the other like, well, the ugly stepsister. Apparently, Fate wasn’t finished doling out the special treatment either.
This year, Ellen didn’t have just a great Mother’s Day. She got an amazing Mother’s Day weekend. Friday night was tennis, wings, and a movie with her crew. Cue the Hallmark moment. Paint this, Norman Rockwell. In other news, I was busy decorating a gym for the eighth grade dinner dance.
But that’s not all. Ellen hates with the burning of a thousand suns going out to a restaurant to eat on Mother’s Day. The bad eggs combined with being crammed in like cattle and the inevitable case of food poisoning that results is a recipe for familial armageddon in her book. So her family, in deference to her wishes, all went out to eat on Saturday which is not only sheer genius, but a lovely gesture that proves she has not just been grumbling to herself the last 14 years. She had a lovely lunch with her girls and her mom and managed to avoid being felled by salmonella or e.coli. Call Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
But the creme de la creme was her Sunday. Her Day of Blissful Nothingness began with her sleeping in way past her usual time when she was awakened to her family making her breakfast. At this point, her day morphed into the Day that Shizz Which Never Gets Done Got Did which any mom will tell you is way better than any old coffee mug or perfume. Her husband Frank who could be described as Husband-of-the-Year but never Mr. Handy-Around-the-House was in rare form. He trimmed bushes, pulled weeds, and even took out a small bush. Yes, Ellen did feel the tremor in the universe, but she decided to take it for what it was, a Mother’s Day miracle.
This is what a perfect Mother’s Day looks like!
Aww, shucks.
Erin’s Mother’s Day was, well, slightly more earthbound. We keep it real here.
On Friday night, Steve asked me, “So what do you want for Mother’s Day?”
Them’s words that make a woman wanna grab her gun and get moving!
Less than 48 hours until the big day and we’re still talking gift ideas!? Hmmmmm.
So I countered with “A dog. Or a trampoline.”
Two soccer games, one track meet, and a middle dinner dance later, on Sunday, we were pointing the minivan westward to visit my family. After the 10th trip to pack the car, the crew was waiting for me with a beautiful plant for the front porch.
Aww, shucks.
But nothing says “I love Mom” like a trampoline, so we were on a mission. Because we live in the middle of a county with more cornfields than shopping malls, we stopped just long enough in the “big city” (Google Frederick, MD to really appreciate my hyperbole) to pick up our trampoline. As the men were loading our 400 pounds of trampoline into the trunk, they said, “Good luck getting that out!” That is exactly the kind of humor we’re looking for when we’re driving with 7 people 4 hours round trip in 1 day. It’s the kind of math that makes you long for the days of algebra.
The rest of the afternoon was spent cousining at my parents’ house. The following is a montage of images from that day.
We call this one, “Baby Licking Window”
We call this one, “Pile O’ Kids”
We call this one, “Twirly Girls”
I call this one, “Mama Love”
In many ways, the whole day was the sweet, cracked family moment I have come to expect. But when we got home, I got my real gift. My boys armed with headlamps and flashlights worked from the moment we got home into the night to set up my present for me. In case, you were wondering, true love looks like this. . .
Hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day!
Erin and Ellen
By Ellen Williams Erin Dymowski
