Mother's Day Gifts

Last year our Mother's Day was a picnic by the river, chilly springtime gardening, and a new baby. This year I woke up, looked around, and realized that Mother's Day was fast upon us.
.
My mom wanted something, not that she asked for it. I was so excited to know what she wanted that it took me right back to childhood. Remember when your mother would insist that your globby clay and fingerpaintings were her favorite items? I was sure then that there were secret unfulfilled desires, unspoken wishes for unchipped china perhaps or a bottle of Guerlain.
.
Now that I'm a mom four times over I often line up my children's dandelion offerings. A hand pressed in clay. A stepping stone with shells from our tidepooling adventure. A Chinese brush painting of a dragonfly, signed in ink, cursive, by my eldest at five years old. Photos. Smudgy bits of art.

All this gift cataloguing got me thinking about the gift of motherhood. The state of being a mom, a woman with a family, and what a present that really is.

It's a gift for generations.

It's a gift to see your daughter cradling a baby.

It's a gift beyond compare to see your daughter cuddled by a mother many generations removed.

I can't seem to think of a single item that could make a mother's day more spectacular than the sight of knobbly, girly knees in tights and of course the perpetually sandy toes washed for patent leather shoes and then, then dancing with cousins and grandparents, asking the unanswerable. Whatever does it mean, Papa, to cut a rug?
.

I hope my mother loves her store-bought gift. (It's so exciting, but this is also the year Mom got on the internet so we mustn't spoil it.) I hope I don't get a single store-bought gift this year.

.

I hope I get more of what made last year's triumphs and tragedies magical. I hope and pray I get that mystical gift of family over and over again for so many years that I can't pick one from the other. I hope I get to line them up as dandelion vases and paper mache' ornaments, no one more precious than the last.
.

Each priceless.

.

I hope you get to do the same.

.

Happy Mother's Day.