Mother’s Day will be held on a slightly modified schedule this year, occurring from 12:00 noon until 12:01 p.m., if time permits.
It has been agreed, after they checked their calendars, that this is a time when all the mothers are available, and also, they can remember it.
The sleep-deprived mothers whose newborns have day-night reversal are available because most of the children who are up all night have slept from 6:00 am until 10:00 am, then been up from 10:00 am until noon, and are now back asleep.
The mothers who have to take time off from work as doctors, lawyers or Indian chiefs to go to their children’s cooperative preschools will be changing shifts then, and there is usually one minute of passing time between the walk up and down the stairs and the car line, which will now be available for celebration.
Those of us who are holding coupons on the line at Michael’s so that we can go home and make costumes (or party favors or birthday gifts or holiday decorations) will observe the holiday by holding a moment of silence for their lost potential.
The moms who work in the middle of the night because, as Virginia Woolf once said, “A man with the door closed is a man working but a woman with the door closed is a woman available”—these moms will have had exactly one pot of airplane fuel-strength coffee by noon and they will be able to focus for almost the whole minute.
If we are at LabCorps getting blood tests for the children (or swabbed for that funny rash our husbands brought home) we will make sure to drink a little extra orange juice when we toast to ourselves.
If we are at the bank getting cash advances to cover the cell phone bill our teenage daughters rang up while they were being talked down from ledges last night, we will all eat mints and feel fresher after the clock strikes noon.
The organic moms will not celebrate with mints or LabCorps orange juice, but will bring something of their own in an approved container.
The moms who are living in apartments with their children after the divorce will open the windows wide and breathe deep.
The moms who have no time but the present and are carpe diem-ing it up with their friends down at the pub will smile and turn off their own cell phones for one minute, and then check all the messages that came from the children during that minute, but they promise not to do this until 12:01.
The “moms of a certain age” will finish paying the credit card bills to cover the expenses of their daughters, also moms, who never grew up because no one ever made them because no one had faith in them or supported them to become anything other than what they are.
The moms who write columns about motherhood and are accused of hating women will swallow their pride and realize that they may hate women but they are trying to love themselves, causing them to wonder if they are really women.
In other news, there will be a barbeque for Father’s Day. Stay tuned for time and location.