Last year this time, I was in New Orleans. Well, technically, I was finishing up a day
at our company’s HQ, with an afternoon flight to NOLA.
It was kind of an amazing weekend. I’ve talked about it before, I’ll talk about
it again. But it was a good time with
good friends.
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| My goodness - what a happy lady! She's laissezing the bons temps roulez. |
One of the nice things about it was the timing. The Sunday
of the trip happened to be Mother’s Day.
Here’s the thing about Mother’s Day. Everyone has, or at some point, had a
mother. And people tend to assume, that
if you are a woman of child-bearing or child-rearing age, that you are, by
default, a mother.
I don’t have kids. I’m
always tempted to answer, when people ask if I have kids, with the old
hackneyed response, “None that I know of…”. I often settle for "Only the one I married." Har, har!
Anyway. Nothing is a
more vivid reminder of your failure to reproduce like Mother’s Day.
So to be tooling around The Big Easy sipping a Bloody Mary
on the big day – felt very, very right.
And unlike being in Nashville, a town so polite where
everyone feels compelled to wish you, woman of child-bearing/rearing age a
Happy Mother’s Day, only one New Orleanian said it to me. I must have given her
the hairy eyeball because she quickly explained that all women are mothers
inherently because of our nurturing qualities.
I don’t disagree, but since my kids that weekend were a
group of friends celebrating a 40th birthday in a most unholy
fashion, I wasn’t feeling especially maternal.
Now, as the den mother of my group, I made sure that everyone called
their moms that day, and they all did. I’m
not a monster.
That brings me to this year.
I am not going on the NOLA trip. My friends are. It was such a good time, we decided to make
it annual. But I couldn’t justify the
expense this year. Next year. I did give
my friend a bottle of Prosecco and a really cute card.
And as you know, I treated Mom to a pedicure last weekend, and I
also sent her a bottle of her favorite nail polish with a really cute card.
But I’ll be here in Nashville Sunday. Presumably without a Bloody Mary to sip, but
with plenty of laundry and such to keep me occupied. And what I think I’m going to do this year, in celebration
of Mother’s Day, is to take the nurturing I lavish on others and turn it
inward.
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| Time to become my own cheerleader. Pom poms optional. |
I’ll give it a shot in the coming year. And next year this time, I’ll let you know
how that worked out.
With a little luck, I’ll be posting from NOLA with a ginormo
bacon-garnished, olive-studded adult beverage.
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