Mother’s Day.

My mother’s day began at 11.45 PM on Sasturday night, when I first realised that I’d completely forgotten to get anything for my mum. Making sure that she was well out of ear-shot, I ran, literally ran up to my brother around midnight, desperately hoping that he’d at least remembered to buy a card.

He had not.

So there we were, in the early hours of mothers day with no present, no card, no flowers and mum sleeping in the next room. I went into a slight panic. There was no way I was going to let mother’s day go by without giving mum something. My brother, on the other hand, took a dfferent approach.

He went straight to sleep.

I spent a good ten minutes running, or rather tip-toeing silently around the house, trying to find some paper to make a card. I couldn’t risk making a card on the computer because our noisy printer was bound to raise suspicion. I finally managed to find a pile of rainbow-coloured paper in my closet left over from an eigth grade school project. Rather than spending time trying to find a pen that could write clearly on the blindingly bright paper, I grabbed the nearby pile of multi-coloured post-it notes and pasted them directly onto the coloured paper and wrote my mother’s day message across them. To finish off, I picked up a ribbon I had on my desk from an old birthday present and attached it to the card, and I actually liked the end result.

After quickly ransacking the old drawers in my room, I found a great old photo frame, buried under some of mum’s old diaries. (I love flipping through her old diaries, by the way. She’s kept letters from dad and old pictures pressed between the pages. Reading the diary entry she made on my first birthday, “Her party went well. She looked so pretty today.”, was partly what made me want to give her a gift so badly). I had a picture in my room from back when I was four or five years old, and I was clinging really close to her. I put it in the frame, then placed it next to the card on the kitchen counter where she was sure to see it when she woke up.

It wasn’t much of a gift, I admit, since it was thrown together entirely from things I had lying around in my room but mum really seemed to like it. She told me the story behind the picture, since I couldn’t remember the day it was taken.

Since I hadn’t actually signed the card I made, assuming mum could tell it was from me, my brother came up to me looking really sheepish saying “Uh, the card’s from both of us, right?”
I got a little mad. He made no effort whatsoever to get mum anything, and expected me to let him take credit for my card. I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t done the same thing on father’s day as well.

Around noon, the four of us left the house to go and join some relatives at a vineyard for a mother’s day picnic. I ate, sat around talking with cousins, kicked around a football, told dirty jokes to my aunts and uncles and actually had a pretty good time.

And now I’m online, catching up with some friends on facebook for the first time in quite a while.