Mothers' Day... Short Story #6

May 4, 2016... I know you've come to this page to read a story about Mother's Day (below), but I'd like to ask a favour first, if I may. The city of Fort McMurray here in Alberta, Canada, has been evacuated because of raging wildfires. Many homes have already burned to the ground, and my cousin and many other moms (and their families -- 88,000 people) have been displaced. If you could offer up prayers for rain to help the fire fighters and for all those who have been evacuated, I would appreciate it...

If you'd like to use this story, please contact mjbpkrus @gmail.com for permission. (I've never said no, and it's just fun if you can let me know where my story goes.)

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For Mom, whom I love more than words can say or stories can tell.

Mothers' Day

The little girl sits at her desk, swinging her legs and chewing the eraser tip on her pencil, looking at the blank piece of paper before her. The assignment is to write a letter for Mother’s Day, telling why the little girl loves her mother. She looks around the classroom for inspiration, then at what the classmate beside her has written. Finally, she leans over her paper, pokes her tongue out of the corner of her mouth in concentration and writes,

          Dear Mom,   

I love you because you are funney, and nice. I love you because you give good pushes on the swings. I love you because you help me to lern to cook macarony somtimes. I love you because you tryed to help me lern to ride my bike, even wen you let go and I fall down. You are good at putting on bandaids and making me feel beter, to. Happy Mothers Day.  

Satisfied, she takes out her pencil crayons and decorates the margins of the letter with colourful flowers. For the final touch, she draws a prize ribbon that says “BEST MOM.” 

Three days later, the little girl gets up very early, sneaks into her mom and dad’s room, and leaves the letter and a small peat pot with a marigold sprig on Mom’s night table so that she will be surprised when she gets up.

At breakfast time, the little girl gets a wet-eyed kiss from her mom, and hears, “thank you, honey.”

Almost exactly ten years later, a girl sits at her desk in her bedroom, a blank piece of stationery before her. “Dear Mom,” it says, and that’s all it says. The teenager wants so much to write something special for her mother, but the words are all tangled. Tears start up and recede again and again. Tears of gratitude for the times when Mom came through with understanding or a hug at just the right moment; tears of anger when Mom said or did something unfair, or refused a special privilege that everyone else’s mom was allowing. The gratitude wins out, and the girl starts by writing,

Dear Mom,

I know we don’t always see eye to eye, but I just want to tell you that you are the best mom a girl could ask for.  Thank you for bringing me into this world, and for listening and for… 

Tears spill out of the girl’s eyes onto the paper, and she crumples the splotched missive and tosses it in her trash can. After two more similar attempts, the girl rips the paper to shreds, dries her eyes, goes to the mall, and picks out a generic card. The best she can do.

Almost exactly fifteen years later, a woman is awakened by whispering at her bedside. She turns away from the little noises and cracks an eye open to look at the clock radio. 6:45 a.m. Her husband is grinning at her, so she rolls her eyes, and turns over to face her three children, who are armed to the teeth with homemade bead necklaces and cards, and hug coupon books. She makes a suitable fuss over everything thrust at her, and then gets up to make toast for her hungry two-year-old, who is demanding breakfast in a language that only a parent can understand.

That evening, the mother creeps into her children’s rooms to kiss them as they sleep. As she looks upon them, she is hit with a wave of what can only be described as mother love, and she thinks,  now I understand those wet-eyed kisses when I was seven. And I probably should have given my mom the letter I tried to write when I was seventeen.

Mother’s Day ©2009, Maria K. All rights reserved. 

For permission to use, please contact mjbpkrus @ gmail.com.

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