Your Mother

by Robbie Pierce

Your mother is someone who loves you and cares for you.

Your mother is graceful.

She presses flowers and stays home all-day cooking cookies and stewing stews and sometimes, in the evening, she puts on her makeup and her expensive dress and goes to the city with your dad.

She’s the lady that makes you take off your shoes in the house, and plays soft music all the time because it helps you concentrate on your homework.

She is soft-spoken and demure; she waits on your family hand and foot and any other body parts she has to spare.

She teaches you how to dance and cook and keep a perfectly organized home.

You watch your language when she’s around and try to be a good person just because she wants you to.

Well, that’s not MY mother!

My mother is someone who cares for and loves ME.

My mother is not exactly graceful. She is boisterous! and loud! and fun!

She mows the lawn and goes to work all day filing files and mailing mail and sometimes, in the evening, she comes home and the house is a mess and she goes in her room and wipes off the makeup and puts on her grungy sweats and cleans up our filth and makes our dinner and washes the dishes and tucks us in

all alone.

She’s the lady who plays in the mud and blasts alternative music while she works in the yard.

Outgoing and hilarious, she works her knuckles to the bone and keeps a smile on her face that outshines the broken dreams in her heart.

She doesn’t really dance a lot, and she often burns our grilled cheese sandwiches, and the whole place can get pretty messy sometimes, but she taught me how to listen and make others feel loved and really mean it when I pray.

I learned all my obnoxious jokes from her, and when not to tell them.

I try to be a good person because she showed me how.

I love you, Mom.

Sometimes I fear you would rather be the first kind of mother. But any son would really want a mom like you.

Thank you for expanding the definition of a great mother.