Mother’s Day Gratitude : Someone Kept Us Alive

Last Mother’s Day, while I was in the trenches of new motherhood again, scrambling to adequately fulfill my newborn girl’s every need, it occurred to me that everyone has someone to thank for intentionally keeping them alive. We were all helpless babies once. We can not remember being kept alive and yet, here we are. Someone has done this for each and every one of us. An odd thought and yet a fact you’d think we’d be a little more grateful for.

Tending to a newborn is a merciless and exhausting job. They are helpless loud high maintenance sleep-stealers. If this is your own baby, clever bonding hormones are cooking in your body to guarantee you adore your child all the way to the end of earth and time and thus you’ll keep the baby well and breathing. Humanity continues because of this bonding hormone. But without the birth mother, someone else must then take on this responsibility to keep active vital signs going for the little person. That notion is staggering.

Even when you do a “bad” job of raising children, you still have to continually provide their basic needs of food, sleep, poo placement, and clothing. As a Mother, I think of myself as multitasking management. I’m in restaurant management, waste management, time management, and anger management mode at any given moment. I work this hard for free because I love my children and I know it was my choice to bring them here. But were they to become the world’s responsibility, someone else would have to take it upon themselves to keep them alive. Or not.

For Mother’s Day, I want to say out loud that I am grateful to my mother who kept me alive and out of harm’s way so I could have a chance to grow up and be a mother and know the amazing gift that children bring to your soul. I knew I wouldn’t necessarily be an Uber-Mom, but my children are both still alive and thriving. And as a mother, sometimes that is all I need to be thankful for.

Happy Mother’s Day to each and every person who ever mothered someone even just a little. Your efforts were noble. And won’t go unpunished. I mean unrewarded.