The Cursed Blessed Mother's Day Gift

I bike to Olive's preschool on another unusually warm Alaskan spring day. 

Olive greets me in the entryway, "Mommy!"

She picks a potted Verbena from the bench and says, "This is for you, for Mother's Day. I painted it." Of the three remaining pots, I could have picked out hers, pink and blue with purple polka dots. 

"I love it! Thank you." We hug and then I gather her backpack and lunchbag as she changes shoes.

We walk out towards the bike and trailer. "Where can we put it?" she asks.

"It will have to ride with you in the Chariot." I strap her backpack to the trailer and stuff her bag of artwork in the back pocket with her baby doll. Olive puts the red Verbena in the terracotta pot between her feet. "It can ride here."

"Perfect. I'll warn you when we go over bumps."

"Can we go the same way as last time? On the street with all the same mailboxes and then past the hospital and UAA and onto the trail."

"That's the plan. Then when we get home we'll park the bike in the backyard and walk to school to pick up Elias from CampFire."

"Me too?"

"Yes, Silly, you too." I'm solo tonight and car-less which is a great excuse for biking, and with only one light before we reach the trail system that runs past Goose Lake and Chester Creek its a pretty scenic route.

We make it to Airport Heights and our backyard without even spilling any dirt from the pot. "I want to bring my flower to Elias's school."

I'm in too much of a rush to negotiate this call. "I thought it was my flower." I smile.

"Oh yeah. But I want to show Elias."

"Then you will have to carry it." I check the time on my phone. " And we have to walk pretty quickly so we aren't late."

"Ok."

Olive carries her painted pot proudly with both hands. She stops to play with the rocks by the drain.

"Olive we need to keep walking. You can check things out on the walk home."

She stands up and follows me to 16th where we look both ways before crossing the street.

I'm a few steps ahead of her on the sidewalk when I hear a crash. Uh oh. I look back to see Olive lying on the path, her hand-decorated pot in pieces before her.

And oh, the tears.

I hug my daughter as she cries. "It's ok to be sad," I say. 'It makes me sad too." She picks up the hardy Verbena, still in tact, as I gather the terracotta shards and pile them in my left hand. A couple cars pass and I catch eyes with a female driver, maybe a mom, maybe not, but from her look I know she understands our predicament.

As we finally continue our walk to school, I tell Olive she can pick one of my pots for the plant.

"The same one?"

"Similar."

"Can I paint it?"

"Yes."

"I want to paint it just like this one."

"We'll see..." My response to many a request these days. We'll see, meaning I can't answer at this particular moment in time.

We reach CampFire with ten minutes to spare, Elias is the only kid in the room, sitting at a table playing with Leggos. He smiles when he sees us, "I'm the last one like I wanted to be!" 

Elias holds up his work for me to admire. It could be anything or nothing at all, "Nice Bud!"

I ask Myrna, the Director, for a paper cup and she hands us a plain white one. We tuck the Verbena into the cup and Oilve promptly drops it on the ground. "Oh no!" she gasps.

'It's OK" A little soil spills but most of whats left remains in the cup and the plant survives.

"Sorry about the dirt."

"Don't worry about it," Myrna says.

"Its an old floor," Elias adds.

"Alright lets all go home. Happy Friday everyone!"

Olive runs ahead on the sidewalk, dropping the cup two more times and picking it up herself, eager to show Elias where she fell. She squats down and scoops more soil into her paper pot. I still carry all the shards, and Elias's backpack, and somehow I have also ended up holding Tonsina's bone.

When we get home, Olive carries the cup to her easel. "Mommy I'm gonna paint the cup purple and orange. Your favorite colors."

"Sounds great. I'll get you set up and you can do that while I work on dinner."

As I slice a sweet potato into small pieces, I hear a cry from the family room. "Mom it happened again!"

The freshly painted cup lies on the rug with dirt everywhere.

"I didn't do it it just fell," Olive cries.

"Its OK Sweetie. We can clean it up." The spry little Verbena hasn't even lost a leaf. I put it back in the cup, with as much soil as I can pick up with my hands, try to dust the dirt from the new paint on its side and suggest, "How bout you put it outside in the sunshine to dry." I leave the rest of the dirt and the paint on the rug to clean later and return to the kitchen.

Olive helps me spread a blanket in the backyard for our picnic dinner and then as I finish up inside she "decorates" it with hockey pucks and her resilient red Verbena right in the middle.

She makes smiley faces with the chicken nuggets and strawberries on the kids plates and carries them one at a time to our blanket. "Where's your plate Mommy?"

"My dinners not quite ready, but you can bring out my plate if you want to set it up."

"I do."

"Dinner, Elias!" He emerges from Google Maps to join us outside for our picnic.

As he settles onto the blanket, he inadvertantly kicks over the freshly painted orange and purple cup and out spills the Verbana and soil onto my empty plate.

What the..

"Its ok, it was an accident," I say, and thankfully neither child melts down as we all stand and shake the dirt from our blanket.

"Luckily, I didnt have food on my plate yet."

"Yeah," Elias smiles.

I convince Olive to move her cursed but beloved Mother's day gift to the side, and we all sit down again.

Later that night, when my children finally sleep and Nick returns from a late evening at UAA, we sit across from each other at the table, talking about our days, as my patient husband slowly pieces together the terracotta shards, super-gluing Olive's present back into a resemblance of its original form.

And I think, as parents, we are like the pot, holding the life of our children in our own fragile hands.

Our world breaks apart when they arrive, shattering everything we thought we once knew about what it means to mother or father a child. Our world shrinks and loses color for a while, as we respond to their needs, as we only see their face when we look out, their tiny hands, their cries is all we hear.

And even so, they keep falling, despite our desire to keep them safe, to keep them in our grasp, and we can't catch them as much as we try, but they don't break (if we're lucky), they just keep reaching their branches to the sky.

Our kids paint us in colors they choose, changing us in ways we never dreamed before these tiny beings with bold souls recreated our lives. And still we fall.

And fall again.

But slowly, with time, we stitch back together our pre-parenthood dreams, finding the lost pieces of ourselves that make us who we are-- but even with strong thread, we recreate ourselves more open, with cracks in our armour and small holes to let light in, or the sound of a familiar voice calling our name.

Mommy...

Daddy...

Dad...

Mom...

Happy Mother's Day to all the parents and to the children that made us so.

 

 

 

Comments

[Mom and Dad]

Beautiful!

[Noel Dennehy]

Oh that was so special and you handled it ALL so fabulously!!Loved reading it all especially after a horrendous week of ups and downs and side ways with health with my family. It was a wonderful "smile" Thank you and Happy Mother's Day to You Oh special Mother!!!

[tina]

loved the story and the metaphors, christy. xox

[S. Bailey]

I love this.

[Greta]

Love!

[valerie demming]

Wonderful! Super! Touched my heart…love valerie

[Sara Sutton Fell]

What an amazing post, Christy. Oh, how it resonates. I hope you had a very happy Mother's day, and happy Friday to you!