There was a bumper sticker I saw on a car once that I loved.  It read: Have you hugged a wet swimmer today?  I have vowed to buy that for Britta if I ever have the opportunity.  In the running world, we get wet too, but in a sweaty kind of way.  When I found Steve after the Vancouver marathon last weekend, he hugged me and then announced how disgustingly sweaty I was.  It was true. I was drenched.  And I stunk.  To my Ragnar “Hot Mess” team, Be warned: After running 3 times in the June Midwest humidity, I won’t be pleasant. I will be rank. I promise to bring a large supply of Nathan Power Shower wipes, but I am fully prepared for Wes to douse me with Febreze at some point.

For many years I was a self-declared non-crier, non-hugger.  Well, we all know how the crying thing has turned out.  And somewhere along the way, I became a hugger too.  I hug people all the time.  I hug hello, I hug goodbye.  I hug because something is funny and I desperately need hugs when I’m sad.  I hug to say Thank you.  Sometimes, I hug just because.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day.  It was my first Mother’s Day as a single mom.  My mom is in Italy so I didn’t even get to talk to her.  It was also one of those years that my middle baby’s birthday falls on Mother’s Day.  Ethan is my kiddo that was born on his grandpa’s birthday.  My dad would have turned 71 yesterday, but he is eternally stuck at 59 in my mind. Talk about a variety of emotions swirling around and crashing into each other all day long.  The day was full of highs and lows.  I woke up to a smiling Ally saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” and then we ate chocolate birthday cake for breakfast.   After Ethan’s baseball game, he chose IHOP as our lunch destination, second to Chik-Fil-A which is closed on Sunday.  I hope my kids didn’t notice how often my eyes brimmed with tears as I looked around at all the families enjoying Mother’s Day together.  Kids and dads sitting together with moms wearing corsages.  And there we sat, the four of us, in the middle of it.  My boys eating as much as they could off my plate, so I ended up with half of what I ordered, while Silas’s chocolate pancake went almost untouched and Ethan’s mac and cheese ended up partially on the floor.  Yesterday I read post after post of guys declaring how their wife is the best mother in the world.  I read posts by moms who had been given flowers, spa days, taken out to dinner, basically just being appreciated.

Being a single parent is about the most un-glorious job in the world.  Not only are you tasked with all the usual difficulties of parenting, there is no one there to say, “Hey, I know how hard you’re working and I appreciate it.”  It’s true, in our custody schedules we get built in breaks when the kids are with the other parent, but we are each required to be the mom and the dad at the same time, working, laundry, paying bills, cooking, fixing broken fishing polls, kissing scraped knees, we do it all.  I did everything I could to hold it together yesterday for my kids, for Ethan on his birthday.  We had a beautiful day together, but my emotions were constantly threatening to tip in the other direction.

I got all kinds of texts yesterday wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day.  So many of them seemed to come right at the exact moment that I found myself thinking I just don’t know if I can keep it together anymore…  As we were sitting down at the kitchen table for dinner, I got a text from Lloyd, one of my brother’s best friends.  Lloyd’s text said: I know you’ve gotten a thousand of these by now, but…happy mother’s day!  Yep, I had gotten several throughout the day, and I needed every single one of them.  Each one was like a hug coming through the phone.  So, to all of you who sent me hugs on my first official single mother’s day…thank you!  To me it was so much more than just a text.

After an incredibly difficult weekend, running today felt like a giant hug.  This morning I dropped the kids at school, promptly burst into tears and then went for a 7 mile run, which was like an hour long hug.  I needed it.  I went to Rockwood Reservation and ran from the little parking lot on 109, through the underpass, along the little creek, past the visitor’s center, up the big hill near the back and all the way to Manchester.  And then I turned around and ran back to the parking lot.  The last time I ran at Rockwood, the trees were almost bare, the sky was a threatening gray color, the last of the leaves were snowing down on me, and my shoes made that satisfying crunching sound as I tromped through the ones that had already met their annual demise.  Today, the sky was blue, the air was clean, the trees were green and full, there were little purple flowers blooming.  And that made me think about how everything in life has to go through that dead period of cold and gray.  Then the rain comes.  And finally everything starts growing again.  Rebirth.  I don’t think it means that everything will be sunny and flowery and perfect from now on, and I know that seasons come and go, but I’d like to at least believe that maybe now I’m on the other side of the dead zone.  If nothing else, I know I’ve at least made it to the rainy season, especially given all the tears that landed on the steering wheel of my Pathfinder this morning.

Last night when I put the kids to bed, after an utterly exhausting day with all of my emotions threatening to expose me at any moment, I was concerned I hadn’t done enough to honor my special birthday boy.  As I tucked Ethan in on the top bunk, over an already sleeping Silas, I said, “Hey bud, I hope you had a good birthday.”  He responded, “It was an AWESOME birthday.”  And he hugged me.

Being a single mom can sometimes feel like all guts and no glory.  But it’s moments like that, that give me strength to keep going and they make it totally worth it.

Hanging with my kiddos on Mother’s Day