It’s once again that Sunday where I swear I see more plants being given as gifts than any other time of the year. Perhaps that’s why Mother’s Day is in the spring. I got my mother a fuchsia again and as I went to take the one she swore had froze to death over the winter, I just happened to notice it was still alive. Now, I mentioned that I gave that to my mother but biologically, the woman I have always thought of as my mom happens to be my aunt, Donna. She raised me, my cousin who has no biological link to either of us and mothers anyone who she thinks needs the attention.
Truthfully, I spend this day avoiding phone calls from the lady my sister and I refer to as “The Mother” who chooses to call on her birthday and her Mother’s Day. That relationship just never got around to developing very well. I find it strange how relationships can come or go. They say the bond between a mother and child could never be stronger but I find that statement to be misguided. The title of “mother” shouldn’t automatically go to the woman who carried and then gave birth after nine months; the “mother” is whoever had the largest impact in the child being raised. It’s the person who stood by every decision that was made but also supplied hints along the way in which direction to travel. As Sherrilyn Kenyon wrote in Acheron “We have three kinds of family. Those we are born to, those who are born to us and those who we let into our hearts." So here’s to every woman out there, whether she cared for her own kids or took on the task of raising someone else’s. Happy Mother’s Day.