You may be a mother if
1. You regularly expose a breast in public and try to hide it behind a baby.
2. You never leave home without a bag, larger than any purse, full of bottles, diapers and toys to suck on.
3. You get up several times during each night to hold something that screams at you.
4. You plan your day around feeding and nap time (not yours) but your day never follows the plan.
5. Your dinner time consists of trying to stuff pureed vegetables into a small hole that is hardly ever open and when you succeed it is spit back into your face.
6. You have to give up that cure little sports car and buy a larger car that can hold child seats, strollers, that bag mentioned above and occasionally a father.
7. You regularly find small humans looking up at you, saying momma and trying to pull your skirt off.
8. When shopping, you often have to pay for things you never intended to buy and they are already broken.
9. You find yourself getting up before dawn and waiting on street corners in the dark waiting for a bus full of yelling children.
10. You find yourself going to school once or twice a year, sitting in desks that are much too small and looking at drawings and math papers that you did not do and listening to a teacher that is not yours.
11. You find yourself filling up your car’s tank nearly every day because you spend all the time between 3 and 6 PM driving between schools, athletic fields and the homes of ladies who teach piano.
12. You voluntarily listen to musical instruments being squeaked, squawked, screeched or played way off key, and claim you enjoy it.
13. You sit up on a Friday or Saturday night, past midnight praying that the door will open.
14. You voluntarily sit in the passenger seat of a car, being driven with jerks, abrupt stops, wandering around the lane, nearly swiping parked cars and trying not to scream every second or two and patiently wait or an hour while someone tries to parallel park between two plastic garbage cans.
15. You live on beans and water because all your money is being sent to some far away college or paying for a white dress that will only be worn once and then not even by you.
16. Your dining table often has extra occupied seats at Thanksgiving dinner.
17. You find that the population of your house grows then shrinks back to two, but may later, if the economy grows bad, grow again. For example, you find someone you have seen only a little of for years, suddenly living in your basement.
18. On a Sunday in mid-May, you sit near the phone, eating Tiramisu and hoping for one or more phone calls from far away.
If you fit one or more of these criteria, congratulations. You’re
a Mother and deserve a
Happy Mother’s Day.
Terry L Anderson, May 12, 2013