The Mom Cycle

Life is about cycles. We start as children not caring too much about being the World Heavyweight Champions of...well...anything but fun - only to later headline the bouts between peer pressure and peer reviews; college or trade; major or minor; marriage or not; kids or none; mortgage or rent; drive or bike; travel or work; win or die trying. Inevitably, we're just dukin' it out until retirement when we can bask in the glows of grandchildren, travel, sippin' tea on porches, and crossing off our life-massed bucket list. By then, of course, we're back where we started: not caring too much about being the World Heavyweight Champions of...well...anything but fun.
Cycles.
And not all bad ones, at that.

Take Mother's Day, for example. Here's a date circled in red on every American calendar whose sole purpose is to make a proclamation - give a shout out, really - to any gal, brod, grand dame, and lady great out there who gives a lot of somethin' we call motherly love. There was a time, of course, when I didn't fall into that category, was in no minivan, playdate, or iphone a mother. I didn't care about library storytimes or how to best fanagle a day-of pediatrician's appointment and, quite frankly, had even less interest in figuring it out. In short? It didn't apply. Then a funny thing happened on the way to my 25th birthday: I became a mother. And you know what? Minivans, playdates, storytimes, and doctor's appointments still didn't matter much. But ten fingers and ten toes and a giggle that sets the heart a ticklin' - these became my top priority.

I don't try to comprehend the ways and means of the magnetic forces drawing me unto them daily (now three in all, thank you Lord!) I'm content to float happily along relishing them in good and tough, laugh and cry, fight and peace...just like mothers before me. For that, too, is a cycle...the realization that, when our mothers exclaimed, "Someday you'll have your own children and..." perhaps an insouciant shrug wasn't the wisest form of first response because here we are, hands in air, wondering, "What the *#$%@ is happening right now?"

Yes, Mother's Day is a cycle. But it's a great one filled with wisdom from the past for the present and coated with the reassurant love that, no, peanut butter sandwiches without the jelly won't ruin them for life, all things considered, because you're still counting the toes and the fingers and getting a good tickle from the giggle.

And, someday, they'll do the same for
their own children.