Happy Mother’s Day to thee who have gone boldly forward and fully accepted their fate amongst the royal order of the motherly persuasion. Boldly, blindly, delusionally…whatever your state of mind, body, and spirit was when you leaned into being a mom, we thank you. It’s been over 25-years since I took human anatomy in college, but I believe it still stands true, that without you there would be no us.

I suppose that’s one thing all of us have in common. Nine months or so of a muffled front row seat to the world surrounding the womb of the woman that bore us. Once that grand exit is made it’s a crapshoot as to how the story will play out for each of us.

In 2018, Toshiko Kaneda of the Population Research Bureau, calculated that roughly 108 billion people have lived on Earth. She defined “people” as modern Homo sapiens that are thought to have first walked the Earth roughly 50,000 years ago. Billions of births, billions of stories, each with a similar beginning, but wildly varying in content, length, and conclusion. So it goes.

Mother’s Day at our house was a day of this-and-that. The sort of day that frequently occurs when the little ones aren’t so little and parents are left to do whatever it is parents do when their time is mostly their own. It was a calm, sunny morning, a novelty of late, so my wife and I eased ourselves into the day sitting together on the patio, sipping coffee and reading, in the morning sunshine.

Sipping coffee and reading…a now commonplace occurrence that seemed so lavishly foreign just a few years ago. You parents of young kids that still rely on you as their daily entertainment director, for now, your coffee will get cold, and most likely spilt on your unread book. Rest assured, and be warned, that you’ll have plenty of time for those luxuries later.

Until then, Mother’s Day, or any day for that matter, is about you doing what the little tyrants think you would like to do, which just so happens to be exactly what they want to do. The parenthood contract is all fine print, and smudged with grubby little finger prints, so it’s futile to try and decipher any of it, just do your best.

How do you know if you’re doing your best? You only second guess yourself more than half the time, and most nights you don’t really fall asleep as much as you slip fitfully into a dark abyss of self-doubt. That’s doing your best.

For Mother’s Day this year I got my wife a bottle of wine, because my wife is a mother, and wine helps mother’s dislike the father’s that got them into this mother gig a bit less. There are many routes one can take on Mother’s Day, wilted flowers, melted candy, overpriced buffets, maybe even a negligee from you young husbands and fathers that really like to waste money.

Choose wisely…your wife thought she did.