At Your Service

“Mom, can you get me _________________ <fill in with “my homework,” “a drink,” “my Gameboy,” or “a pair of socks.”>

“Not right now, honey, _________________ <fill in the blank with “I’m doing the dishes,” “my hands are full,” “but maybe after I change this diaper,” or “I’ve got the baby in the bathtub.”>

“But Mah-am! You’re closer.”

“Yes, but, I’m busy. You’re perfectly capable…and anyway, I’m not your servant…”

“You never do anything for us!”

What is so absurd about that comment is that everything I do is for them or because of them.

My children are my “why.” They are why I get up in the morning (usually earlier than I would like to), why I go to work every day, why I “vacation” at a local beach rather than at a Caribbean resort, why I drive a Mommy-wagon, why I have toast crusts for breakfast and half-eaten chicken “noggins” for dinner, why eating out and going to the theater means having dinner on the porch (because the dining room table is covered with laundry and homework papers) and seeing animated films at the movie theater (rather than borrowing them from the library), why our house is decorated in the fingerprint-and-strewn-toy motif, and so on ad infinitum.

I really am their servant. I spend most of the time when they are awake at home serving them in some way. I am a cook, waiter, janitor, nursemaid, laundress, chauffer, referee, tutor, spiritual advisor, activities director, drill sergeant, and will step into myriad other roles on an ad hoc, on-demand basis.

Recently at a garden store, when the guy ringing us up did a double take at the eclectic mix of flowers we’d chosen and my insistence that we needed not one, but three, “boy-colored” watering cans, I told him, “I’m not just growing flowers, I’m growing children.”

I’ve known from the moment they were born, that my job and my joy has been to nurture them along until they can become self-sufficient. I must remain committed to my mission even though it’s bittersweet to observe how sophisticated my two school-aged sons have become compared to the innocent exuberance of their two-year-old brother.

A Salary.com study concludes that if paid the salary of the equivalent work a mother performs, a woman would earn between $85K and just over $138K, depending on whether she was a “working mother” or a stay-at-home mother. (Hello? Aren’t all mothers working mothers? Surely, what they mean is “income-earning mothers.”)

I don’t get rewarded in dollars for my motherwork. Instead, my compensation is that my children are my motivation, my inspiration, and my revelation. It is because of my three little muses that I know the true love of God, which radiates through me to them and then reflects back. Proudly, I wear their boogers, drool, and other wipings on my shoulders like epaulettes. And while one day my servitude will end, no matter how independent they become, the emotional umbilical cord will remain unsevered.

Happy Mother’s Day!