Happy Live-In Girlfriend/Dog Owner Day?

I hate Mother's Day. This is a new thing for me. Yes, it was a week and half ago, but I was just asked today how Mother's Day was, so it came swirling back into my head. My whole life I never thought one way or the other about Mother's Day. I always buy my mom a card, and if we lived close to each other, we'd joke around about going out to brunch because we both hate brunch. A menu featuring both breakfast sausage with waffles and a patty melt is just wrong. And don't even say the words "Brunch Buffet". Just the thought of oxygenated hollandaise sauce makes me throw up a little in my mouth. So, whatever, that was Mother's Day.

But it hit me this year. A girl at my new job wished me Happy Mother's Day when I was leaving on Friday (pretty much everyone there is a mom) ... I knee-jerked a blurt: "I'm not a mom!" Because just saying a simple "thank you" and leaving it at that wasn't right. If I did, I felt like I was deceitfully attempting to "pass" as a parent ... like I was posing as a member of an elusive club I didn't belong to. And then there's the people who know me and say Happy Mother's Day ... and I do the usual not-a-mom thing and they say, "Well, you're a mom to Pearl!" (Pearl is my 9 year old cattle dog.) And just so all of you real mothers know: I would never, ever liken dog ownership to being the mother of an actual homosapien who catapulted out of my kookoo after 9 months of parasitically sucking the ever-giving life out of me. It's like when a cat owner tries to draw similar parallels with a dog owner -- don't go there ... it's just not the same. Cat's don't need you, they do their business in a box, and you could come home after a 4 day camping trip and the cat wouldn't have even known you were gone. Trust me, I've done it.

But despite various attempts to allow me to sneak under the Mother's Day fence, the truth is, I'll never have a Mother's Day. And, I realized, I'll never get a Mother's Day card. Not even the 99 cent ones in Spanish that I buy for my step-sister at WalMart. As I was picking out a card for my mom this year, I saw all of the cards that were "From Husband", "For the Expecting", or "For The New Mom". Why don't you just kill me now, because what I was really looking for was: "For The 40-Something Selfish Slogging Late-Bloomer With Scrambled Eggs", or "From The Boyfriend Who Refuses To Procreate, But Loves You Anyway" ... or maybe "From Your Utterly Pissed Off Mother Who Will Never Be a Grandmother"! They don't make those.

So, to celebrate this day, my boyfriend and I made dinner for our mothers (the fathers could eat, too!) and the cards and toasts went around the table, all of us concurring as to how wonderful they are ... and they are. And it was nice and not about me. I wanted to feel hurt and left out and jealous and poor me ... but this day was about them, and they earned it.