An open thank you note to the four people brave enough to call me Mom

Today, I’m toasting my four children and the happy fact that I’ve been hosting Mother’s Day celebrations every single day since July 8, 1987.

Thank you to Charlie, Katherine, Vinnie and Molly:

• For eating my homemade chocolate chip cookies even though I almost always burnt the last pan.
• For storming in the front door, stomping up the steps, slamming the bedroom door, grabbing a fat pencil and writing in your shaky second-grade hand “I’m mad, o.k.?” on a paper airplane and shooting it downstairs.
• For wearing beaded anklets to play in the city championship and reminding all those screaming parents that you were just a bunch of little kids hitting a softball off a T.
• For jumping on your training-wheeled bike and hustling off to school when I realized too late that I’d lent my car to your older brother. Then saying, as I frantically jogged along beside you, “Well, this is a fun little adventure, isn’t it?”
• For thanking Santa when he gave you a poem instead of the Wii you’d asked for, because his non-confrontational helper let someone grab the very last Wii in the entire world right out of her hands at an exhausted Target store during the great Wii Christmas run of 2006.
• For looking down at your ordinary khaki pants and everyday blue shirt and saying, when we saw all those other little girls in their pretty dresses and remembered it was a dress-up day, “It’s okay, Mommy. I think I look nice today anyway.”
• For writing, casting and producing your own school play after you didn’t make the community theatre play, but your little sister did (even though the audition notice called for boychoir type boys and you were a member of the Appleton Boychoir and she wasn’t even a boy).
• For not being mad when I found you standing alone on the playground one day, the last to be picked up from school.
• For forgiving me much faster than I forgave myself when I turned in your permission slip late and your teacher wouldn’t let you go on your third grade field trip.
• For the fat penguin.
• And the homemade cards.
• And the macaroni necklaces.
• And the dandelion bouquets.
• And the tea parties.
• And Biskupic Family Fun Nights.
• And the butterfly kisses.
• And the mud pies.
• For growing up to be the kind of cool, funny, gentle people with whom I love to share a dinner table.

Thanks, man, for the endless privilege of being your mom.