Mother's Day Musings

I'm so not at all sure where this is going to go....I've been thinking about my mother, and my daughter, and my daughter's birthmother.

Then there's the wonderful Rica, whose wedding is coming up.

And the beautiful A., who is losing her mother slowly inch by inch to a cancer that, from the sounds of things, didn't have to kill her this soon.

It's been a day of mothers and daughters.

As those of you in the adoption community know, the day before Mother's Day is referred to as Birthmother's Day.  Given that I haven't heard from the Demie Diva's BM of late, I figured it was time to do a little bit of Facebook exploring.  In so doing, I found that she'd delivered a stillborn baby a couple months ago.  Part of my heart broke for her.  Part of my heart was so profoundly grateful that she didn't have to deal with CFS coming into the picture.  Part of my heart was further grateful that the cycle of poverty and so forth wasn't perpetuated another generation.

I realized today how much that sums up my response to the Demie Diva's birthfamily.  They are very much a perpetuating cycle of poverty, pregnancy, and serial monogamy.  There is the potential for much more, but I realize that we as a society and an educational system do NOT do anything to help the least of these become more than the least of these unless they are, in fact extraordinary.

This brought my musings to my beautiful daughter of my heart.  She's getting married - in the place closest to her heart -  to a wonderful man she met in the Orange Bubble.  She's going to do Teach for America.  Her sister ... the cycle continues...but MY girl...wow.  The Demie Diva will be a flower girl.  She will, I'm sure, bow.  She will definitely drive me to a liver sling between now and the wedding.

The which, of course, brought me to my own mother.  The liver sling, I mean.  My partner in crime.  My best friend.  She has NO patience for what the XH's shenanigans do to the Demie Diva.  And, since there isn't any attachment on the latter's part, the shenanigans do a lot.   I had my last duty weekend of the year this weekend.  The Demie Diva does NOT like it when I have to work - I don't either, but, honey, it beats paying real rent.  Thank God for my mother.  The Diva Grandma is a goddess.  She heard this morning's sorrow at having to spend the day with her dad.  She messaged me tonight to ask why I was still up - and poured a stinger so that I wasn't drinking "alone" - and said everything about my XH and his lack of attachment to anything but a soccer ball that I can't say cause LORD knows what the Demie Diva hears in her sleep.

And, as I "chatted" to my own mommy, my thoughts turned to A., who is also an only child, of a PhD in English - whose mom is her best friend, as mine is, and, I suspect, as the Demie Diva will  one day be mine.  My heart broke a little bit.  A's mom has been battling breast cancer forever.  No follow-up PET scans meant bone mets.  Bone mets mean eventual death.  That time has come, and the angels of hospice have come.  A. is hustling  home from school on Wednesday.  Her FB status told her mom to hold on, and quoted Love you forever.  "As long as I'm living, my mommy you'll be"

Maybe that's the real message of a day that most of us, to quote my own pungent and pithy mother, want to "shove up Hallmark's a--".

Mother love is universal.  It is all-encompassing.  It means that when someone messes with your baby, you go (to quote another pungent and pithy woman in my life) "all mama bear on their a--".  It is fierce, it is primal, and it is ferocious.

Erma Bombeck (and now I'm showing my age) wrote a beautiful column once, about the day God created Mothers.    My own mother shared it with me.  Every single time I read it, I cry.

Tonight, it's for A., and for my beloved Rica, and for the Demie Diva, and for my own beautiful, amazing mother.

Happy Mother's Day.