Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 12, the day when we celebrate our mothers, grandmothers, wives and daughters with brunches or breakfasts, flowers or a just a phone call for those of us who live too far away to travel. The day also offers those who have lost their mother a chance to reflect on her influence on their lives.
My daughter Athena was born June 8 last year, meaning I celebrated my first-ever Father’s Day almost immediately, but Sunday will be my wife’s first Mother’s Day.
Last year I wrote that “witnessing her body’s changes as she prepares to give birth to our first child has been amazing. I can understand the reverence early humans placed on the process of motherhood: From feeling the first kick, to seeing the growing belly, to watching our unborn daughter roll and stretch beneath the skin of her abdomen.
“Despite all our advances of science, technology and civilization, I can appreciate what our ancestors found awe in 40,000 years ago — an unchanged, complex process is still just as wondrously beautiful.”
Over the last 11 months, as our daughter has grown from a purely instinct-drive newborn into a tiny person with personality, habits, moods, idiosyncrasies, quirks and sometimes even attitude, my wife has become the type of mother every child should have: Endlessly caring, always playful and wholly fixated on Athena’s needs and her happiness.
Simply put, my wife is a Disney princess. I’m what those artists draw when they go drinking.
Yet her evolution from girlfriend to wife and mother has transformed me from committed bachelor into a father and a far better man than I was before meeting them both.
With one child steadily moving toward toddlerhood, my desire to have more children is wholly up to my wife — being the one of us with the life-giving womb — but if this amazing experience of raising a child can be repeated, I’m all in.
Aside from advice and some literature, neither of us knew the first thing about parenting when she was born, but my wife took to the task like a natural. I am uncertain whether motherhood truly comes instinctively, as some friends have told me, perhaps to spare my feelings of inadequacy as a father, or whether my wife is truly an exceptional parent who I had the sheer dumb luck to meet, then meticulously woo and eventually wed. Either way, she is a much better mother than I am a father and deserves to be celebrated at least one day a year.
Athena is far too young to understand the significance of Mother’s Day. Each of her days bleeds into the next. She spends most weekdays with grandparents who pick her up in the morning so we can go to work. Saturdays she spends with the “Muppet” who freely lets her claw his face and pull his goatee. But every day, she gets to spend all or most of it with the soft, pretty one who sings, gives her baths, feeds her when she wakes up in the night and laughs at the silly things the “Muppet” says or does.
As making macaroni art, finger-painting a card or writing rhyming poetry are still years away, it’s up to me, in Athena’s stead, to celebrate my wife as her mother.
Part of that is telling our readers about her awesomeness via an editorial — in which she serves merely as an archetype to remind us all of our own mothers, grandmothers and female role models who have shaped our lives — but also by giving her something she can cherish and enjoy.
I have been told by friends with children that what young mothers really want on Mother’s Day is “time away from their kid,” jokingly or seriously, so this weekend I’ll take Athena for a few hours so my wife can be pampered for a short while without thinking about anything but herself, which she can rarely do anymore.
It’s not much, but I’m still new at this and Athena didn’t offer any suggestions — but in her defense, she hasn’t figured out consonants yet.
We sincerely hope you enjoy this Mother’s Day and honor the women who have shaped our lives.
— Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
