Happy Mother’s Day, etc. etc.
It isn’t procrastination. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I just haven’t had the confidence to sit down and do it.
Here’s the thing about making a gift: if you spend too much time working on it, you’ll realize it was a mistake. You should never make a gift past a certain age, unless you have certain art abilities. I am twenty-one and have few art capabilities.
Still, I am making my mom’s Mother’s Day present.
I only remember doing this once before. I was in late elementary school, I think, and it was the night before Mother’s Day. I don’t know if I had dreamed up this art project months before or the day before the holiday, all I know is I didn’t actually start working on it until late Saturday night.
My vision: a beaded person who was to look like my mother (brown beads for hair, green beads for eyes) would sit in a cardboard box of a house, at a construction paper table, on which a construction paper vase of flowers rested.
I worked late. It was ten or eleven at night. I was in my basement watching reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle as I slaved away. Before I went to sleep, I put the cardboard box creation on the kitchen island, as was our gift-giving ritual, awaiting my mother’s morning response.
She took it to work with her. That all-in-one-night art project lived in her office for years until she switched jobs. I remember when she took the thing home finally: the construction paper was faded and falling off.
I don’t know what happened to that cardboard box project; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were still tucked away in Mom’s closet.
I love my mom, but I don’t think giving her anything will really suffice. Hullo, she gave me life. Hullo, she’s fed me, loved me, paid my bills. Hullo, she let me run amok overseas last summer. (I didn’t really run amok.)
So, this year, I decided to give back to her my favorite thing she ever gave me: a love for writing (and a knack for it!). I wrote her a poem.
As cheesy and cheap as that may seem, I have a feeling she’ll appreciate this more than the bag of Dove chocolate I gave her last year (at her request, even).
I’ll post the poem only because it’d be rude of me not to after all this yammering:
—
Twenty-one Mother’s Days
For twenty-one years:
Binky, baby doll,
Playskool kitchen,
stuffed Barney, beanie babies,
curly-haired Cabbage Patch cuties,
books you’d never read,
CD’s you’d never heard,
shiny shoes (you hated, I loved),
seven pairs of polka dotted panties.
In twenty-one years
the best gifts you’ve given me:
life and a love
for words.
—
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! I love you.
Happy Mother’s Day to all you other moms and motherly ladies.
Lauren
May 8, 2011