Sunday, May 13, 2007

Hiccups

It's Mother's Day, of course, and while I really ought to sing the praises of my mom, I find myself oddly at a bit of a loss for words. I've said a fair bit about my mom of the course of writing this blog, not that she's read any of it because she's not a computer person. But myself and mom have always gotten along. It's a bit easy to be spoiled by that kind of relationship and forget how rare that is. I'm honestly hard pressed to think of how ofter we've fought or argued about anything. And yet, I never got away with murder or was really spoiled.

That's quite the neat trick. I have no earthly idea of how she managed to pull that off. But like most good magicians, you don't reveal how you pulled off the trick.

But the other thing occurring to me this Mother's Day are some of my female friends who are now moms. I was chatting with OM for a couple of hours last night just because it had been awhile and she has a few things going on right now. And I recently exchanged a few e-mail with another friend who is juggling two kids. And I do have others in similar situations.

The thing is, it always amazes watching my friends become parents. Since many of many friends are women, it tends to mean watching them become moms. Now, I'm not going to go telling tales, but I went through university with some of them or bummed around with them in the years afterwards.

And it's not that I doubted they would make great mothers. It's just...I've seen most of these women hammered. I've seen them engage in questionable behaviour. I've seen them silly, funny, crazy and irresponsible.

And now they're moms. Fragile little things look up to them and depend on them. They think their moms are best thing in the world an incapable of making a mistake of doing strange things. And my friends are really good at it.

It's not that I ever doubted they could do it. But it's still strange. To quote from John Rogers, "it's an odd mental hiccup in one's world construct."

Still, to them and my own mom, Happy Mother's Day.

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