Mother's Day

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy!”

I gasped and jolted awake, bumping my skull on the headrest. In the doorway stood my daughter, Zoe, my five-year-old angel who had ever so graciously given me four hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep. The beaming, gap-toothed smile on her face was worth every second of being kept awake with an unending stream of Youtube videos.

Well, nearly.

I tried, okay? Don’t judge. I’d usually get her to bed at eight, and then, somehow, she’d be up at midnight sneaking around, no matter how much I pleaded with her to go to sleep. That was probably the first time I’d considered putting a lock on the outside of her door.

All of those points were moot, though, when I realized something incredible: she knew it was Mother’s Day. She was right, too. It was May. It was Sunday. It was the middle of the month. I’d forgotten, myself.

I beamed back at her, threw off the blanket, and spread my arms wide for a bear hug. She came running to me, still dressed in her pink plaid pajamas, inexplicably sticky.

That should have been my first hint, but then again, children are almost always inexplicably sticky.

I ran my hand over her tight, curly, black hair that I loved so much, courtesy of her father’s side of the gene pool. It needed brushed out and re-braided badly, and was honestly a little bit sticky, as well.

“I made things for you, Mommy!” she squealed, bouncing on the bed on her knees, like the monkeys in the proverbial rhyme.

“Did you?” I said. Her excitement was infectious. “What kind of things?”

“Things,” she repeated innocently.

Zoe bounced off the bed, landed with a thud, then threw up her arms, like an Olympic gymnast. I clapped. A perfect ten-point landing.

“Well, can I see these things, or what?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Oh, a surprise,” I said, with a nod. “Do I need to close my eyes?”

She gave it serious thought for a moment, then shook her head, whipping her braids across her face.

“No. You just have to stay here, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to grin too much. It was impossible.

She took off down the hallway towards her room, giggling like a maniac. I allowed my grin to spread all the way across my face until it hurt. These were the moments my mom had tried to explain to me before I’d gotten pregnant, the memories that made motherhood worth every single second. Zoe was a good kid, too, most of the time. Precocious, and headstrong, but there were much worse nightmares running around in her kindergarten class. She hadn’t bitten anyone since she was two, that was a plus.

She came running back in with a huge piece of pink, folded construction paper, which was positively drowning in glitter and markers and glue.

“A card!” I gasped, taking it from her gingerly. It was still wet, tiny bits of glitter falling from it like a light flurry of silver snow.

On the front, she’d drawn what I assumed were hearts, resting inside of each other, and punctuated all around with smaller hearts and Disney princess stickers. The inside read, in nearly indecipherable handwriting, ‘MOM,’ with a stick figure stretching its arms all the way across the width of the card in an impossibly wide hug.

“It’s beautiful, baby.”

Strangely, I thought I caught the faintest whiff of strawberry coming off of the card. That should have been hint number two, but Zoe did have some scented markers and stickers floating around her room, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

She put her hands on top of her head and moved from side to side. Always wriggling, that one, even from before day one.

“I also did a favor for you, Mommy,” she said.

“I get a card and a favor? Lucky me!” I didn’t even realize she knew what a favor meant.

She nodded emphatically. “You still have to stay here. I’ll get it for you.”

“Alright.”

She took off again down the opposite way, towards the kitchen, and only then did my mom senses start to tingle.

There was a rattling noise coming slowly back towards my bedroom, along with a clatter and a yelp.

“Zoe?”

“I got it!” she answered, then reappeared carrying a heavy tray laden with two mugs and a very sloppy peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“Oh, wow, you made all that for me?” I asked, an uneasy feeling growing in the pit of my stomach. I sprang out of bed and steadied the tray as I took it from her. “Thank you so much! I’m going to go eat this in the kitchen right-”

“Mommy,” she protested, nearly grabbing the tray back from me, “It’s breakfast in bed! You have to eat it in bed!”

I looked down at the mugs filled to the brim. The tray lip barely held in a shallow mixture of spilled Tang and green tea. The PB&J, plateless, oozed over the side of the bread and mixed with everything else, the bread soaking up all the liquid it could.

I sucked in a breath through my teeth, trying to bullshit my way out of the situation without sending her into a tantrum.

“How about… I eat it in the bedroom? Right here?” I asked, plopping down on the floor. “It’s a bedroom picnic.”

“Okay,” she said, satisfied, and I tortured myself by eating a soaking wet peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The Tang was warm. The tea was cold. But at least I was dripping on the rug, one I planned on getting rid of anyway, instead of the comforter.

Sitting there, gumming down tea-tainted peanut butter and leaky, orange flavored bread, was when it really hit me.

The kitchen.

Oh, shit.

I set the tray in front of me, slowly, deliberately, then stood up.

“I’m gonna get something,” I told my daughter, then went down the hallway, praying I wasn’t going to see what I thought I was.

My prayer went unanswered.

Zoe had gotten peanut butter and strawberry jelly everywhere. On every surface. The drawers. The table. The counters, the fridge, and the toaster. Every. Single. Thing.

I took one step onto the hardwood floor, and my foot landed in an enormous orange puddle of Tang. A chair was scooted up to the counter, and my eye followed it upward, where a cabinet door had been flung open wide. My precious, imported green tea bags had fallen out of the cabinet and lay scattered across a thick bed of jelly, ruined. How did I sleep through this?

“Oh. My. God.” I whispered, though this somehow proved to me that there was no God.

“Mommy?” asked Zoe, in the way only a little kid could when they knew they were in deep shit. “I made the card for you, too, so you can’t be mad at me.”

“Oh yes. Yes I can,” I said. As much as I wanted to explode right then, it would do no good. She knew what she’d done wrong.

“I tried to do a Mother’s Day favor,” she grumbled.

“Well, you made a big Mother’s Day mess. How did you even manage this, Zoe?”

The silence that followed surprised even myself, so I let out a very long breath, just to insert something into it.

“Do you know what would actually help me, right now?”

“What?”

“You know where the mop is?”

“Yes…” The look on her face told me she knew where this was going.

“I’m going to teach you how to clean up after yourself.”

“But—”

“Ah, ah!” I warned, putting up a finger. “Do not. It’s either that, or you get grounded for a week. Which do you want?”

Zoe stared at her feet, as still as I’d ever seen her, and said, “I’ll get the mop.”