Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day, Ladies!!!!! This goes out with special warmth to all of you who are having your very first Mother's Day today.

I like the concept of Mother's Day as a reason to take some special time to honour ourselves and each other for our important role, but I don't buy into the whole Cards and Flowers thing. Partly because I'm not a sappy person. I enjoy sappy people immensely, but I'm not one of them. The only things I'm really sentimental about are old baby clothes, teeth, placentas, and silky locks from first haircuts. I don't have a backlog of birthday cards or a piece of wall that marks my childrens' changing height...I don't have baby scrap books or anything like that. I care about my children as much as the next guy, but I'm not bogged down with material momentos. I'm way too disorganized for that. Kudos to those who are good record keepers. My traditions are kept by simple storytelling, otherwise we'd lose our history entirely.

A perfect Mother's Day to me would be to sleep without one single, solitary interruption, have all the tedious things I normally have to do on a Sunday to make sure chaos doesn't reign supreme the rest of the week taken care of for me, and freedom from having to decide what's for supper. Being a mom is hard. Harder than anything. I don't mean it's not joyful, heartwarming, amazing, fulfilling and all those great things. But it is complicated. Often it is overwhelmingly stressful. Let's be real...on occasion, a day that would honour ourselves would mean taking a day off from all of this, so we could come back refreshed, centred, and ready to keep going strong. I am SO grateful to have children. They are the reasons for my being. They enrich me beyond measure, and I let them know that all the time. I would like Mother's Day to be a nationally enforced Mother's Day Off Her Regular Duties day. Not only would it make us feel good, it would remind others just how much stuff we do all the time. It would also give us time to connect to the magic of being a mother. It can be hard to step back and get some perspective when we're always trying to get on top of all that needs to be done to make things run at all, never mind smoothly.

I decided this Mother's Day to do something special, something that would make me feel really connected to the joy and amazement of motherhood, and to make my youngest child feel special too. I finally decided to bury Finn's placenta, which has been sitting in the freezer for nearly 5 years, patiently waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. In the photos, you can see it's pretty knarly looking, having been frozen for 5 years. Today, we planted it along with a gorgeous baby flowering crabapple tree, fitting for the strong, sweet, beautiful Finnie he is. He placed a rose in beside it to say, "Thank you". I contemplated with some sadness how this will be the last of my placentas I say goodbye to. I have had at least one (and at times 3)6 year or under child to care for for 18 years. This planting symbolizes the completeness of my family. Before we planted, I found a tiny crow's feather beside a white rose bush my husband had planted last week. To me, this was auspicious, as crows have always meant nothing but good things in my life. Crow reminds us that magic is real, and provides us with good luck on our travels. I will keep that feather for Finn, as a symbol of his link to that which helped form and nourish him so well. I know many of you Westerners think this is gross, weird, and hokey, giving second thought to a used up organ that looks like liver...but there you go. I will officially have to bow out of the Facebook Group "I have a placenta in my freezer...I'm not kidding," because it is now safely in the ground, nourishing a tree that will grow and become a protective, beautiful part of our home's landscape.

Happy Mother's Day, Friends. I hope you were able to create a little magic today to honour yourselves.