Mother\u2019s Day is complicated, and different people have very different reactions to it.<\/p>\r\n
Sympathies to all for whom Mother\u2019s Day is a difficult, painful, or complicated day.<\/p>\r\n
Happiness to all for whom Mother\u2019s Day is a joyful occasion to celebrate.<\/p>\r\n
To those who have no strong feelings about it either way, and to those experiencing a mix of these situations, I hope you had as good a day as was feasible.<\/p>\r\n
Today, Kam and I took Kam\u2019s parents to Foothills Park for a Mother\u2019s Day picnic.<\/p>\r\n
It was the first time I\u2019ve been to Foothills Park in many years. It was largely just as I had remembered it.<\/p>\r\n
The picnic was a great success all around. We ate good food, engaged in enjoyable conversation, and contemplated lovely vistas.<\/p>\r\n
Most of the time, Mother\u2019s Day isn\u2019t a big deal for me, and I didn\u2019t expect it to be today.<\/p>\r\n
But Foothills Park is where my father and my brother and I scattered my mother\u2019s ashes, when I was twelve years old.<\/p>\r\n
When Kam suggested going there for today\u2019s picnic, I thought about suggesting going somewhere else. But then I thought it might be a good day for a return visit. And I thought I was doing fine, and that it wouldn\u2019t be a problem.<\/p>\r\n
But sometime around the time, post-picnic, when we arrived at the upper vista point, I started to get sad.<\/p>\r\n
I didn\u2019t say anything; didn\u2019t want to turn it into a sad occasion, or focus everyone on me. And it was still a lovely view and good company, and I wasn\u2019t overwhelmed with grief or anything.<\/p>\r\n
Just sad.<\/p>\r\n
Late next year will mark forty years that Marcy<\/a> has been gone<\/a>. I wondered, today, how different my life would\u2019ve been if she\u2019d lived. What she would\u2019ve been like at forty-five, at sixty, at seventy-five this past year. What she and I would have thought of each other in my adulthood.<\/p>\r\n Friends\u2019 parents have been very good to me over the years. But sometimes I miss mine.<\/p>\r\n After we left the park, I stopped by K & P & E\u2019s place, where I spent the first ten minutes or so of my visit buried in excited wriggling small dogs, which was a lovely antidote to sadness. Then the human residents and I had a great chat about various topics\u2014computers and books and patterns of society and more. Then I went home and had a lovely visit from M & P & J for the rest of the evening.<\/p>\r\n The day overall was really good. I got to show off my Tesla Model 3 to multiple appreciative audiences, and have good food and good conversation with people I like and don\u2019t see often enough. I laughed a lot, and got licked by puppers, and mostly wasn\u2019t particularly sad. But it was still a little complicated.<\/p>\r\n (P.S.: Apologies to people I saw today for not talking about this\u2014I wasn\u2019t really up to discussing it, and the time never quite seemed right. But thank you all for making it a good day.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parents-children"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17935"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17946,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17935\/revisions\/17946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}