My Children, My Friends

There’s nothing like Mother’s Day to send me down the rabbit hole. First, I get trapped in a royal maze so strewn with neon signs flashing “empty nest” and “getting older” that I want to beg the queen, “off with my head!” 

Luckily, I dash into a potion room and drink one that saturates my brain with smiling memories of everything from couch cuddling to college tours. I see three-year-old Aislínn twirling with abandon on the Clearwater Festival dance floor as her dad sings on stage. I imagine toddler Sean placing the last Lincoln Log on the extravagant fort we’re building (for the zillionth time) while his siblings are in school. I practically taste 10-year-old Ciarán’s culinary delights after he fell in love with Emeril. 

Feeling like Glinda the Good Witch, not for her sweetness, but her ability to float in a bubble, I glide over birthday parties, soccer games and boogie boarding challenges. I giggle at my tribe’s music-making, Halloween costumes and chiminea s’mores. Then I relive our first major camping trip to Maine, when I read Harry Potter aloud for most of the 10-hour drive and hooted with delight as my young trio make it slowly up the sky-high peaks. This morphs into the image of them, as teens, high-tailing it past me to even higher mountaintops during our adventure in Eye Rolls & Awe: A National Park Road Trip with Teens.  

With my Cheshire Cat grin, I could disappear into decades of past reverie. Yet something suddenly pulls me forward to the faces of my three adult children. They say the vagus nerve is the body’s happiness superpower. Looking into the eyes of my grown daughter and two sons sends me into vagal overdrive. Those feel-good endorphins flood my every cell. 

These three human beings – from the time they entered my world – have given me so much. They made me more curious, more patient, more introspective. Plus, they always made me laugh. 

Of course, we’ve had annoyance and stress, for sure. But that all-encompassing kid drama seems to have faded like their over-washed jeans. What’s remained brilliant? My children’s care, their kindness, their deep desire to live in ways true to themselves.  

Each of my offspring has grown into someone I truly like and respect. What more can a mother want? And while I’ll always worry about them as their mom, I’m forever grateful to be in the stage where we also are friends.