It keeps coming up, every year, like a very lazy, but consistent, gopher.  Of course, like all holidays it is profitable catalyst for the various businesses and industries that prey on nostalgia, veiled acrimony, and pregnant guilt.  Mother’s Day!

Actually, if you look at my post from last year, you will see that the name has been changed to Mom’s Day.

A family is a quilt, or a tapestry, or some other such threaded thing.  Work goes into its functioning and success.  I am not six years old; I am a little bit taller.  I have managed to whittle away my naiveté and occasionally drench it with a cold bucket of experience.  My mom is not the only mom in my life.  My wife is also a mom.  I had to buy her an Apple Watch for Mom’s Day.  What the heck!  She’s not my mom!  But, I did leave my father and mother and united with my wife (and my daughter’s piggy bank just don’t got that Apple money).  But I didn’t leave them, leave them.  They’re still there, and sometimes here.

Let’s be honest; things can get a little bit trickier when you get married.  They definitely get a lot more awesome, but sometimes, tricky awesome.  Its no longer about do you have enough gas to get to Wendy’s and do you possess a sufficient allotment of batteries for your wireless X-box controller.  You have to think about other people and stuff like that.

But sometimes you start thinking and it gets weird.  You think about your mom and your wife and their kinetic relationship.  Your mom is headstrong, a rock personality (I am more of a water personality) and your wife is also forcefully forward oriented (again the rock).  They both love their kids, fiercely.  They both have big sensitive hearts that make you smile and sigh.  Somehow you (me) are in the middle and its terrifyingly terrific and frightfully fabulous.

My mom is a grandma and a mother-in-law and I am a husband, a father, and a son and my wife is a wife and a mom.  I feel like I need a diagram to keep the connections straight.

To L, I say thank you for raising me.  Thank you for the time that you put in being there every day and for smoothing the road and putting out a path.  My passion for people and learning came from you.  You are the most selfless person I know.

To A, thank you for accepting me, for choosing me when you had no obligation to do so, and plenty of reasons not to do so.  Thank you for partnering with me in the insanity of life and bringing two little girls into this world as testaments to our love and the enduring, unrelenting grace of a Savior God.  You are the most loving and lovely person I know.

To these moms and to moms everywhere- God bless you!  A world without moms is not only a biological impossibility, it is a dead world.  Besides, who would tell you to pick up your clothes?