Mother's Day Report

I am having one of the most wonderful Mother's Days ever.  The sun is shining.  Ed is upstairs folding laundry and vaccuming.  A  former college roommate, visiting from out of town, is outside planting tomatoes. I am making waffles. And now from another old friend comes this wonderful, wonderful Mother's Day poem by Billy Collins.

So I'm sharing this poem for all you mothers.  But before you read that, I would like to thank my children from the bottom of my heart for transforming me into a mother. It has been the most incredible experience any human being could have.  I am so grateful to the universe for sending you to us! 

And I'd like to thank MY mother for teaching me so much about how to love little children.  And I'd like to thank HER mother...because she got it from somewhere and I'm pretty sure that's where she got it.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.