Sunday Musings on Mother’s Day
Sunday musings (on Mother’s Day, listening to the bingoettes Mom)…
1) Mom again. Raise a Mother’s Day toast to our Crossfit.com couple, H E R M and Patty(Cookie) who are both betrothed and with child. What a joy!
2) The gift. As per usual I have neglected to get a card for Mrs. bingo. I’m just not a card kinda guy, I’m afraid. She says she loves me anyway, mostly because I will get in the dirt with her and plant flowers later on today.
Oh yeah…I’m also up with the dogs this morning.
3) Little victories. I spent part of yesterday afternoon watching Mrs. bingo’s first ever equestrian competition. It was actually her first competition in anything, ever! One of her teammates, a women in her 30’s I believe, had a day that exceeded the expectations of everyone who knows her and her horse. The horse, you see, is a “project”, and that means exactly the same in the horse world as it does every where else in sports.
Despite universal praise from trainers, teammates, and spectators in the know, this young woman found none of the good in her performance because it didn’t measure up against the other, fancier horses or other, more experienced riders. She took a victory and turned it into defeat by forgetting what the competition was for her rides. Like any rookie it was you (and your rookie horse) vs. you, and darn it if she didn’t win! She just couldn’t get herself to accept the victory.
Beth, Mrs. bingo, spent a little time with her cataloging those triumphs. She pointed out the need to not only notice those little victories but to REVEL in them. And not only on a horse but in the daily rides that constitute regular life. In many ways our day-to-day lives are also you vs. you, and you can’t really win the bigger games if you can’t be happy about the tiny gold medals that come with the tiny victories when it’s you vs. you.
4) Mothers. “In the beginning children love their parents. As they grow up they judge them. Sometimes they forgive them.” –Oscar Wilde.
Mrs. bingo and I are now in the stage where the bingo progeny are judging us. Comparing us across all kinds of parental times and domains as it were. I think Mrs. bingo is going to fare quite well in that process, with little for them to forgive, and anything that might require forgiveness done so without much fanfare. As parents we have searched our memories as children in order to bring forward those things we cherished in our own parents, and to banish (as much as possible) those things for which we found it necessary to forgive them.
You see, the rules of parenthood are in may ways the same as the rules of childhood because the currency is the same for both. Whether Mom or child we have but two coins with which to carry on the commerce of our relationships: love and forgiveness. Mothers don’t always like their children, and children don’t always like their mothers, even on Mother’s Day! But almost without exception they love one another, even during times when they may not really like one another too very much at all.
It’s in the forgiveness, I think, that we recover from those periods where we don’t like our parents, and indeed where we don’t like our kids. This part of both motherhood and childhood lasts as long as one is privileged to be some Mother’s (or Father’s) child. As children today on Mother’s Day, we should strive to remember this, strive always to spend not only the love coin but also the forgiveness coin, today and for as long as we are privileged to have a Mom.
And tell her to keep the change!
Happy Mother’s Day to all. I’ll see you next week…
Posted by bingo at May 8, 2011 5:19 AM
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