This weekend is Mother’s Day.  Some people say it’s just another holiday made up by the greeting card companies to commercialize our feelings and to sell multitudes of flowers.

Now I happen to be a mother, so I tend to be very un-cynical about Mother’s Day with its homemade cards and focus on yours truly.  I actually adore this holiday.  I adore almost every holiday really.  I find they help me to mark moments within the year – a year that is usually moving much too fast for my liking – and make me pause and reflect on the important things.  And Mother’s Day is no different for me.

Every Mother’s Day for as long as I can remember we gather with my parents, with Craig’s parents, and sometimes my brothers family.  We travel into the city to spend the day all together with my paternal grandmother.  The only grandmother still living among us.  We gather in her common room and order Chinese food and exchange flowers and cards and gifts.  We take lots of pictures and tell lots of stories.

And it never fails.  Every year.  Every single year for as long as I can remember we make the time to do this.  Somewhere along the way we have said “this”.  This.  This is important to us, and no matter where we are or what we are doing, we always make time for “this”.  We tend to be a family of traditions in this way.  I love that about us.

But this year it’s not going to get to happen.  At least not on this weekend.  My son and I, along with my Dad I find out, have all been hit with a doozy of a bug.  The kind that lays you out for days and the type we would never want to risk taking into my 103 year old grandmother. (And no, that’s not a typo.  She’s 103.)

So I’m sitting here on the coach feeling a little sorry for myself that we don’t get to make that happen this year.  And I worry a little bit that by the time we get nine to thirteen people’s schedules back into play again, that it may not happen at all.  I’ve been sitting thinking about that a lot.  Worrying it may not happen.

But guess what?  That’s our choice.  It’s always our choice what we do with our time.  And I am bound and determined to make it happen.  I’m already counting out the days when we wont be infectious carriers of mean nasty viruses.

I guess that’s why holidays … all holidays … have never been just a commercialized event for me, and why they have always meant so much.  They mark a time when I purposefully set aside a day where nothing else gets to matter more.  Nothing else gets to matter more than this.  Than these people.  It’s a way to make sure the real moments happen with the real people who matter most.  Because sometimes in life we spend way too much time making the superficial things happen with the people who really don’t.

So although I won’t be spending this weekend surrounded by four generations of Robinson/Wilkie/Rhyno women, men, boys and girls, that’s alright.  We will make it happen.  I know we will.  Because we very purposefully set the precedent long long ago, that this is what we do.  This is what we care about.  This is what matters.

And for that, every Mothers Day, I whisper thank you.