ON THE DAY WE HONOR THE MOMS

mother's day mother's day mother's day.

this is what i think: when it comes to making cookies, you have two options. you can either decide what you want, and then try like hell to make it happen using whatever ingredients you got in your cupboards, square peg/round hole style; or, you can walk into your kitchen knowing what's there, and make the best damn thing out of what you got. if you're all out of chocolate, you aren't going to make a very good chocolate chip cookie. but you can make one hell of an amazing snickerdoodle.

motherhood, womanhood, life, is like that, i think. we're all these kitchen cupboards stocked with who knows what, all kinds of things. every ingredient is valuable. some of us can whip up the best chocolate chip cookies without even blinking. some of us are out of chocolate chips, so we wait around a while, until the grocery store opens, or until a neighbor lends us some, and then our chocolate chip cookies are ready. they're just as sweet, they just take a little longer to bake up (and you're extra hungry by the time they're done). some of us look in the cupboards and make spaghetti. 

myself, i chose to wait for the chocolate chips. not because chocolate chip cookies are the best cookie on the planet, and not because a crappy chocolate chip cookie is any better than a really great peanut butter cookie (you know what, a crappy chocolate chip cookie satisfies no one), but because, while my cupboards are full of a lot of other great ingredients for a lot of other great food, i'm just not as interested in it. i tried making snickerdoodles, they came out flat. i'm not very adept at spaghetti sauce. peanut butter cookies are fine, but they don't hit the spot for me. but i can make one hell of a damn fine chocolate chip cookie, once i have all my pieces in place. and i'm willing to wait till the store opens. and what does that mean in the long run? probably nothing, really.

i am so fulfilled by motherhood. every day with huck is a dream come true. we have the most fun. being a mom has been my most favorite thing. not because that's how i was told to feel. not because being a mom is better than being an attorney or an artist or a really great crossword puzzle solver or whatever. and not because i'm biologically wired that way. i'm not biologically wired that way. i have to twist my own arms to make babies, many chemicals are involved. but i am so fulfilled by motherhood and feel so honored and lucky to get to do it. i suspect it's for the same reason i like marshmallows and have stocky ankles: because i came out that way, for whatever reason. 

i still don't really like mother's day. i don't like the sanctimonious tone it can sometimes take, i don't like to propagate the idea that every woman should feel most fulfilled by the same thing, like we can all be threaded through such a narrow definition, and i don't like smug self sacrifice, in any arena. but i do love my baby. i love my days with him. i love my faulty hormones, and i love the cockeyed optimism of my ovaries. my ovaries keep on chugging, even when my uterus is like, dude. i love my college education and i love my feminist rants i go on that make people roll their eyes and i love how well read i am and i love when i can remember every song lyric ever written after listening to it once. i love my stupid mouth that often gets me into trouble. there should be a holiday for snickerdoodles. and spaghetti lovers. i mean, mother's day is beautiful. i am grateful for the reminder once a year to celebrate my own mother, who is the fiercest woman on the planet earth. she is the epitome of hard work, and love, and positive attitude, and the classiest broad i've ever had the pleasure of knowing. my mother is a force. but actually being a mom is such a small sliver of "motherhood," and "motherhood" is an even smaller sliver of what it means to be a woman. 

on this mother's day i want to celebrate the women who are waiting for the store to open. i want to celebrate the women who saw the chocolate chips, but knew that what they really wanted was banana bread, and baked that instead. i want to celebrate the women who are really good at eating other women's chocolate chip cookies, even if they never baked a batch of their own. is this analogy getting too ridiculous? 

there is more to being a mother than chocolate chips. 

and there is more to being a woman than chocolate chip cookies.

now that you're all done rolling your eyes at me, here is how we celebrated fallopian tube output day.

we finally made it to the spotted pig! brandon left work early friday afternoon to try our luck with us for a freaking hamburger. only 20 minute wait this time! (the last time we stopped by there was a two-and-a-half hour wait, is this not nuts.)

somehow it's become a tradition for us to celebrate mother's day in small bursts all weekend long. so rather than getting the dishes done for me while i laze around for 24 hours, i dictate all our activities all weekend long like a tyrant. which i'm really good at. i did the dishes AND the laundry yesterday. but brandon did take out the garbage. 

on saturday i dragged my boys into brooklyn for the flea market. on our way there the skies opened and we got our first good summer thunder storm. one of my favorite things about life on the east coast are these intense displays of lightning and thunder we get during the summers. i'll take the swampy air if it means a big show of rumbling every now and then. we got completely drenched, it was magical. 

i like to make my husband come to the brooklyn flea market with me. i also like it when i bump into friends randomly! latonya + belle are two of the most talented women in my personal arsenal of talented women that i'm i lucky enough to call my friends. 

my finds from the day:

from the same vendor who sold us our nautical flag, which was kind of sweet for me. plus two donuts from dough. bam!

then i took my boys downtown to try a new bagel shop i've had my eye on. 

holding onto my boy's collection of rocks while he pets a puppy, while i try to decide what he's most likely to eat and whether i should take a risk on the ricotta, apple, and honey bagel from black seed bagels, this is mom life. i like it. 

egg salad on sesame seed. thumbs up, black seed. 

and here is "bad guy man" waiting on a slice of pizza (not in the mood for bagels, turns out). over the weekend huck declared himself the sidekick to my evil villain. i don't know, but that seems pretty right on to me. 

so, happy mother's day and junk. 

hey did you know that only 2% of couples are actually, incurably "infertile?"

doesn't that bode well for all of us?

hang in there, mamas. 

the store will open. and your cookies will be amazing.

a whole bunch of older mother's day thoughts from this blog nonsense:
here, here, here, and here. poor you. ;)