Mother's Day

Grief, and the triggers, are weird.

Mother's Day (or Mothers Day, for the plural non-possessive, or Mothering Sunday, if you want to avoid the whole grammar thing altogether) was very difficult for me this year.  Why should Mother's Day be more difficult than Gloria's birthday?  As I say dates and days and anniversaries are not particularly important to me.

But Mother's Day was very hard for me this year.  I had to leave the church service.  It's difficult when you're crying and you don't want to disturb the other people who are rejoicing.  Its even more difficult when you're crying and everybody else who is rejoicing doesn't notice.

Why should it be Mother's Day be so hard this year? Why should Jann Arden's "Good Mother" be playing over and over again in my head?  Gloria *was* a good mother, of course.  Gloria loved her girls.  Gloria enjoyed Mother's Day, and she enjoyed it when the girls were able to come by, however briefly.  But Mother's Day, other than that, was not particularly important to us.

Why should it be Mother's Day?  Why wouldn't it have been Gloria's birthday?  I'm not grieving for my own mother who died earlier this year, so why should I be particularly grieving Gloria today? 

It was a weepy day.  I sent messages to the girls.  The grief group has been exchanging messages, and they have found it difficult today.  But I was having a weepy day before any of that happened.  And then why should I why should I get weepy in church?

Church should have been good.  After all, six shoots of corn have come up!  And, in addition, six of the sunflowers that I thought that I thought were lost forever have sprouted as well!  (I covered them all with plastic cups to try and keep the squirrels from doing them in.)  So with this victory in hand, why should I be crying in church?

When I had to leave my main church, I walked to my emergency backup church.  Even though the minister there was doing a sermon that was much more directly to do with Mother's Day, I was OK.  Thinking back on it, what seemed to set me off in my main church was all the mothers and daughters.  My emergency backup church gets all the kids out for Sunday school before the service starts, so nothing set me off, there.  Not even all the flowers for the mothers.

(I am old enough to remember when the flowers were colour coded.  You had a red flower if your mother was alive, and a white one if you mother was dead.  I saw one mother leave the service with her two girls, one carrying a white flower, and one a red.  Bit of a mixed message, there ...)