... "Here's your forkin' tea"*slamming imaginary cup of tea, with the fork in it, down on the table*
I was presented this morning with a cheese burger, a slice of pizza on toast (warmed in the toy microwave, of course, as is customary of correct reheating of - apparently - the world's favourite breakfast fare) and a cup of tea. With a fork in it.
My handmade gift from Lolly was the obligatory, gorgeous kindergarten teacher project. She proudly told me that her picture for me had "TWO photos on it" when apparently the other kids' only had one on theirs. Don't know why. Perhaps because they tried (and failed) twice to get her to actually look at the camera and stop grimacing? Cheeky minx. I love the bottom photo of her because it looks so much like the old grandmotherly type look of 'sufferance' that comes out in her when she tries to over-mother Steve and me. Look at her! Is that a shawl draped over her 3 year-old shoulders? I think it is....
I was also very spoiled by way of the LGBB's first ever self-chosen Mothers Day gift for me: a pretty pink candle. I have decided it will be the candle I light on Mothers Day, in honour of all the mums who have lost a child. Today, I remember one mum in particular who I know is doing it really tough - her first Mothers Day without her 9 year-old daughter, who was tragically killed in January - and it makes me choke up today, just remembering the staggering number of mothers trying to get through today and willing nightfall to come, mercifully, to take their pain away for the brief hours they are spared by sleep.
I remember my first one well. To be dealt the crushing double-whammy blow of coping with this oh-so-stigmatic, largely commercially driven day as well as it being the first one without our daughter here..... Well. I thought I would surely spontaneously combust. How would I get through it? How could we go anywhere on that day and NOT see countless cars full of (not necessarily happy-looking) family, driving alongside us, claiming more rightful positions in every single restaurant, at every single table. It was like the world's biggest middle finger salute in my face, every cotton-wool-haired granny's head visible in the rear of every Camry being driven around to the rhododendron gardens, all put in my way to taunt me about how old I would grow. Never to be driven around by that little pink bundle who slipped away, so painfully recently.
Today, I graciously accepted the waiter's well-trained wishes of a "Happy mother's day" to me, as we were seated at a table in a little restaurant nestled in a small township the bush, not too far from here. I smiled as I watched our second born little girl grimace about the "warm wind" - no, not her father, but the patio heater we were sitting under and to which she had taken a great offense - and I cradled in my heart all the mums inching their way through the unbearable, unthinkable, surely unsurvivable pain of this, their first Mothers Day to get through without their child, knowing that the sun would eventually peek through again for them sometime.
One day.
