Of all the official days that shopping centers mark on our calendar, this is one of the stupidest. The Mother’s Day. Unless, of course, you get a good pinch of the coupon that ONCE takes out for the anniversary, something as unlikely as that your daughters answer the first time when you call. It seems incredible how their mobile phones are always silent, or they have run out of battery, or they are charging it, or they have not heard the ring. They go to their ball, blessed age. Things change when they are the ones who ask you to bring them, back home from work, I don’t know, a mix of nuts because they have had a bad day. Then the world has to stop and you answer them ipso facto… The fact is that the world does stop, and you answer, and you bring them the peanuts.
They want you for something.
They love you (you love them) forever.
Mother’s Day is celebrated tomorrow, a commercial ruse. Because a mother is every day, at all hours, at every moment… The first day of the universe and the last. This very moment in which you type the four letters of mom. Absurd or not, here you are, back on topic.
You usually say, not so jokingly, that you’ve been tempted between two and equis times to send your offspring to the depths of hell. Being a mother is neither easy nor free and no one is perfect. You do what you can, not always well. It’s okay to admit that the position is sometimes too big for you.
The face of motherhood carries the cross of guilt. For being, for not being, for doing, for not doing, for saying and for not having said. Some of us feel halfway between the severe judgment of colleagues and mother friends or not (more clever and more of everything) for not always being one hundred at home or for not always being one hundred at work.
About being a mother. You confirm that you were not the center of the world, you discover your lioness side (like Esteban, “for my daughter, I kill”), you accept your frailties as strengths and, when you can, you find a moment to go back to being your old self. .
What if it compensates?
Each one knows their own.
yours. One Friday you come home in a foul mood after a week that started badly and continued badly and can only end well. There she is, in the kitchen at home. You put the key in the lock, ring the bell just in case, open the door and go in ready to let go of the outside world because you already have enough for today, it’s over.
You blurt out: “Hooola.†And she responds: Hello. Hellos sound different, they are.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.
Ugh, it’s just…
“Did you bring me the peanuts?”
-What do you think?
You sit next to him. You open the bag. Between peanut and peanut, you chatter non-stop. All your ghosts dance. What if this, what if that, what if this, what if that, what if the other… You describe, in frantic incomprehensible turns, the unwanted side effects of maturity. She listens to you. She is at that age where she can already understand everything, and you without knowing it.
You whimper like a girl. And hugs you She does it with such energy that she feels the contracture of your back creak. Oh. You feel saved. She rescues you. Children, your safe space.
– Do you know, mom? That is not worth it.
And that’s how, looking at those big shiny black eyes, is how you manage to jump with a triple somersault one very crazy week.
