Every year on Mother's Day, we tend to get super sentimental about the things our moms do for us on a daily basis. They patched our wounds with bandages and kisses when we fell off a pogo stick in the second grade, and they sassed us into cleaning our rooms from the day we learned to fold clothes. Dust bunnies ruminate our thoughts as we grow older and forget to be grateful, but they also stir with commemoration every year in May.
I have trouble imagining life without a mother. Mine has whisked me away from so much pain and cleared a space in her world specifically drawn around my crooked hands and grimacing cheeks. My sister and I are second-best in her eyes, next to our 12-year-old black lab, and I have grown up to understand the sarcastic rankings. The thing that really gets to me, however, is that there are a plethora of people in this world who fall to the bottom without strong parental figures in their lives.
I don't want to sound like a Hallmark card, but I am realistic in believing that, in some way or another, the world will give you a mother. The rhyme is super adorable, but honestly, the go-with-the-flow concept of this world has a way of understanding our greatest aspirations and nursing them calmly into happening. We are encouraged by one another, our worth bursting in the eyes of all the fertile hearts of every human on the planet.
There is a certain cataclysmic cynicism that will inhabit most of the earth's population at some point in their lives, but there is also a massively refreshing revelation that will follow soon thereafter. Growing into our own, no matter what our living arrangements, is the human condition, and we don't need to hear the tales of our mother's labor to validate its authenticity.
No matter where you come from or where you're headed, there will always be a driving force that produces you a little bit each day. There will always be something, someone, or somewhere that makes you feel like the guitar chords in "Yellow" by Coldplay. There is always room for a Gilmore Girls-like relationship between you and any tangible feeling you can muster.
For me, fortunately, that feeling stems from a mother who is a playground for innovation, a grocery store for my constantly hungry bear of a stomach, a medicine cabinet for every scrape and bruise randomly patched to my Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-inspired legs, a rainstorm for every tear and triumph I deserve on my face and all I will ever need to grow into the human I persist on becoming. My mom is a single mother, who is filled with endurance and tenacity, carbonated with energy and rapport. She delights and charms every morning with a witty, magic sort of realism that doesn't seem to hurt as badly as it should, and I admire to develop those same strengths. Her humane and understandable ways run deep through my entire family: pieces of a puzzle that, if never found, would have left me empty.
My mom has made me want to become a mother myself. Not necessarily for any specific living being, but for the entire world. My mom makes me want to be the encouragements sewn into grandmotherly pillows, the teacher who stands tall and wise especially outside of a classroom and the female who removes the rankings in the world to create a level playing field for every individual to verbalize their bravery.
This year, this May, this forever, I would like to recognize all of the mothers of the world, as not only the most successful artists, but the most generous. Mothers aren't just women who spend hours on end in pain in hospitals, but the utmost important force behind every masterpiece, willing to become more with every passing day. Mother's Day is my favorite slice of Thanksgiving, and I literally owe every breath and broken bone to my mom and the world she has sculpted around me. I feel more intrinsically alive than ever before, and I can completely chalk that up to the honor of being a daughter. I dedicate every single one of my words and wisdoms to my own mother, as she has taught me 99 percent of everything I know, which includes ruling the world, loving gracefully, and writing my feelings.