a tiny moment: It's just before lunchtime. There's bread rising that I kneaded this morning at the breakfast table while the kids ate oatmeal and told me their hopes and plans for the day. I'm still wearing the apron I started the day with - my great grandmother's apron - over the clothes I pulled on upon crawling out of bed, only a slight variation from the ones I wore the day before. With cookbook, pen and paper in hand, I bring it all outside to plan the meals for the next few days. My oldest, with new cleats - or 'super fast running shoes' - on his feet, is doing laps around the house, with me as his time-keeper. "On your mark, get set, Go!" and I begin counting. Nineteen seconds later, and he returns, jubilant to have beat his previous record. "It's the shoes! I'm going for 18 now!" he declares. My middle child - a constant companion, an appendage if you will on this particular day, is at my feet laying in the grass, and digging through the newly arrived box of seeds for planting, touching all that his little hands can touch. "Mama," he asks, continuing an ongoing conversation we've been having, "if we did live in a place where bananas grow, could we grow bananas and potatoes too?" and "how many days would it take to drive to a place we could grow bananas? What if we all rode on one bicycle? Like all five of us, wouldn't that be weird?", and a five-year old conversation about local foods, and the physics of bikes begins. As my meal planning list gets put aside - I realize I've distractedly written 'bananas' for dinner tomorrow night - my youngest is suddenly at my side. She's come running up from a spot at the far edge of the grass - the only spot which she has yet to clean out of dandelions. "Mama, these are for you!" she says in a sing song voice, with one hand behind her back, as she hands me a pile of dandelion heads and runs off in search of more.
My days - much like yours, I would guess - are full of tiny, simple, ordinary, even mundane moments like this one. Sometimes they have more tears, anger, attention, care, frustration, distraction, noise, or joy - the emotions and the circumstances run the full and entire spectrum. Sometimes I'm more present than other times. The moments of mothering, in my experience, aren't full of dynamic, extravagant and earth-shattering events. They're full of little moments like these. The world quietly turning, a heart steadily beating.
I wish all of you - wherever you're at in your mothering journey, be it yet to come, happening now, or in your memory of days' past - a Happy Mother's Day full of peace, love and joy in the tiny moments.
