We don’t use our dining room table so much for eating. Usually, the chair that’s there for me to sit in instead holds my purse and coat with the pair of shoes I just took off tucked underneath. On that half of the table, there might be a book or a folder or the grocery list or something I need to put in the mail piled on top. But towards the end of the semester, especially the one at the end of the academic year, the one that comes right before summer vacation, my side of the table becomes a holy mess — as does just about everything else.

At this point, I’m just trying to keep it together for one more week. If I can just get through next week, there will be more space, more time, and I can finally clear off this table, clean out the garage, balance the checkbook, fold and put away all the laundry, weed the front flowerbeds, dust off my meditation shrine, wash my car, clean up my eyebrows and shave my legs, breathe — but until then, this pile is what my life looks like.

Right now, Eric is texting me pictures from the hike he’s on with the dogs. I wish I was there with them, instead of here trying to not feel too bad about the mess and procrastinating because the next thing I need to do is go to the gym.

I just took a break from writing to call my mom, wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. I’d already talked to her a few days ago, and the present I sent her had already showed up, (although, the books I sent, she’d already read, and there’s a good chance that’s because I’d already sent her the same ones some other time). I’m so lucky to be able to just pick up the phone and talk to her, to open my email and have a message from her, to be thought of so often and so fondly. She can’t call her mom anymore. S. can’t call her mom and misses her every day. S. won’t get a phone call from one of her daughters, and that daughter won’t be getting a Mother’s Day gift from her son. J. is still feeling the ache of grief from the loss of her two tiny ones. C. wanted babies, tried but never had the chance. People I don’t know have lost their mothers in all kinds of ways, and many mothers have been separated from their kids for all kinds of reasons. I’m keenly aware that today isn’t just happy.

It reminds me of a post Anne Lamott wrote about the day, Why I hate Mother’s Day. Which then makes me think of two posts from Dash and Bella, I Know a Mama Who (2012) and I Know a Mama Who (2015). I love all three of these posts because they are honest, about the mess and the confusion and the joy. Whatever this day is for you, may you feel some of that mother love, even if you have to give it to yourself. ❤

“to all mothers, the motherless, the mothered well, the mothered terribly, to the ability to mother in any mammal, to mothers lost and mothers found. to the mother that is the planet. may we learn to lead with our hearts even through fire or dark.” ~Lidia Yuknavitch