Mother's Daughter

Who would have thought that Mother's Day would be so full of almost-crying moments for me?

Very early this morning in the car I was listening to NPR as they closed one of their shows by announcing who did what (for example "This show was executively produced by Ona Motapia") but instead of saying their own names they said Daughter or Son of their mother's name. It took about a minute to do all the credits like that and I laughed first then got all choked up. And I know it wasn't just because I was up before dawn on a Sunday because that's par for the course these days.

Mid-morning I made the Mom Day phone call to the home base in Wisconsin, chit chatted with Daddy for a few, who then passed the phone to my sweet little mother. Most of our conversation consisted of talking about re-doing the windows of the house and spring allergy attacks, but at some random unexpected point in the conversation I had to take a moment of deep breaths so I didn't burst into tears. Not that crying on the phone to Mom is totally out of the ordinary, but it doesn't usually happen when talking about weather/home improvement.

Earlier this evening I was again listening to NPR as I worked on my very slow-going needlepoint project, and I caught the tail end of a story which consisted of a grown son who was given up for adoption speaking one side, and his biological mother speaking on the other. It was the story of him finding her and greeting her for the first time, and when the woman spoke of the feeling when the child that she had given up walked up to her to "initiate a hug" I choked up and once again had to reach for the kleenex.

I don't have kids and I'm not expecting them anytime soon, so the multiple teary-eyed moments caught me a little off guard. Maybe because as I'm watching more and more of my friends and contemporaries have kids I can relate more closely to parenthood? Maybe because I recently realized for the first time that I do indeed want to raise children one day?

Maybe because deep inside I'm just a little girl who really misses her Mommy.