I Forgot Mother's Day and Survived

Were it not for a couple of bags of leaves and grass clippings that needed to be hauled to the dump, my Mother's Day sin would have haunted me through eternity.

Half of my brain knew yesterday was Mother's Day. That segment of the cerebellum suggested to Jo that we rearrange our usual Sunday-morning schedule--breakfast, newspapers, crossword puzzles, Wordle--to allow for the probability of long-distance calls from the kids. 

Jo, like so many women, tells her family that Mother's Day is just an opportunity for florists and greeting card merchants to hawk their wares. Still, like mothers everywhere, she likes getting calls from her children.

They did call, so the aforementioned half of my brain was glad I'd rearranged our schedule. Unfortunately, the other half of my brain didn't remember that I, too, had a role to play. Just as distant children brighten Mom's day with phone calls, husbands join the parade of honor with cards, flowers, lunch at Mario's--anything to show he, too, appreciates the life-long challenges and sacrifices that come with motherhood.

So, for the first time in our decades of marriage, I dropped the maternal ball. I forgot to do my part. I committed a sin of omission so degrading that nothing Jo said could cheer me. All afternoon she'd try to console me with the observation that "it's just a Hallmark holiday." Her generous spirit was countered with my pitiful cries of "I suck. I am worthless. I am a worm and no man." Basically, I was turning this celebratory day into a cornucopia of self-pity. Hell of a gift, right?

However, we must remember the grace and mystery with which an all-merciful God operates. He solved the problem with a lesson given at the city dump.

I now pass on to you this lesson:

If you go to your local landfill late on Mother's day, or the following morning, you are in for a surprise. Adult children across the country have flown their widowed mothers home for the weekend. They've provided Mom with a nice time, a pleasant dinner, and then driven her to the airport. For the past few days, she's been showered with floral bouquets that can't accompany her on the flight home, so she leaves the flowers behind.

And the moment Mom's plane achieves liftoff, the children take the floral tributes to the dump. 

The lesson? By the time night falls on the local landfill, it's a festival of fresh flowers just waiting for you. 

Thank you, Jo, for your acceptance of gifts a day late, scavenged from the grass clippings and tree limbs at the  dump. Thank you, God, for your enduring mercy, just when it's needed.

And, thank you, people who invite their widowed mothers home for the Mother's Day weekend, fete them, toast them, then get rid of them and toss the evidence in the landfill. 

Some would say such behaviour disgraces the perpetrators and the mothers who bore them. 

Maybe so. But, one man's iniquity is another man's salvation.