Mother's Day, Bittersweet

This past Mother's Day marked my 2nd as a Motherless Mother. It was filled with endless activity which kept my mind busy from the the bittersweet that it seems this holiday will always be tinged with. I need that, I know now. Because last Mother's day, just two short months after my Mother's death, my thoughtful husband booked an entire day of quiet indulgence.  Neither of us could have anticipated what that day would turn out to be, except that now I know what it's like to:

Cry on a massage table
Feel deeply envious of a hairdresser (and this time it wasn't baby-related, but mother-related)
Be pitied openly by an esthetician
Get flowers for my mother only to have nowhere to bring them
Pray for an end to the day

Just a month before Mother died, my in-laws proposed going camping on Mother's Day weekend. My Mom didn't want me to go because she thought it might be her last one and wanted to spend it with me. We were both so confident that that date would come to pass. How I wished that were the case and not that we had already spent our last Mother's Day together almost a year before.

There were so many years spent in longing to celebrate this day as a Mother but I never anticipated the mark that losing my own Mother would forever have on it. Like I said, bittersweet.  The gift of one, the loss of another.

Every Mother's Day, I buy a plant for her and pray that my black-thumb doesn't kill it before the season is over. This is the meyer lemon tree I got this Mother's Day because she loved eating lemons (as does G). Happy Mother's Day, Mom.