No Ceramic Ashtrays - Simple really. Simple.

Over the past 30 years or more, this time of the year has always been a little bitter sweet. You see this is a holiday that I do not celebrate. I can't honestly ever remember celebrating this day in my life. I don't recall making some lame ashtray or a paper mache' flower collage out of construction paper and tissue. In fact, I don't even know what it is like to buy one of the cards that is specifically to a mom. The cards I have always picked out are the ones that say, "Your like a mother to me" or "Because you are a mom" or To my friend on Mother's Day. I have gone through the same motions of buying cards like this as long as I can remember with little or no personal feeling about that I was not actually getting a card for my mom.

Now I know that over the years of my life there have been many a surrogate that has touched my life. Most of these ladies I call "Momma". I have been blessed to know them in many ways. But there has never been one that I call MOM. The closest woman to ever be my mom, well I called her Mae. She was an African American woman from New Orleans that had a certain way about her that was borderline nutso but for all intense purposes - she was the closest thing to a Mom that I knew. And that "nuttiness" is what I really think what has made me the woman I am today.

I was hoping this year would be different. I would have for the first time been celebrating Mother's Day, but in a different way. I was going to be the mom. Someone would have got me a silly hallmark card that said Happy Mother's Day. For some reason, I felt that this year would have been the first "sweet" Mother's Day I had ever celebrated. No more bitter. Life had, as it always does, finally found a way for taking the bitterness away.

I am not sure why today is tougher than any other day for me. I am not at work being stressed, I am not sitting in traffic, I am not even up against a life changing decision. Today I just am.

I just am sad. I feel like it would have been really nice to have a mom last November when I miscarried, someone who did not embarrass me for crying, someone who was not going to rationalize all the medical facts, someone who was not going to expect me to immediately be "back to my old self" , or expect me to go straight back to work on Monday. I just need a mom to hold me and perhaps cry for a little while, someone that can be sad with me, someone that probably would have understood - understood SOMETHING I was and am going through.

So this year, it won't be such a impartial Mother's Day as it has been the last 30 years or so. This year it will be a little bit sad for me. And I deserve that. I deserve to be sad so that I do not have to be anymore. I am not strong. I am not the person the men in my life think I am. I wanted a mom, and there are times that I needed a mom and right now is simply one of them.

Simple really. Simple.