Love is a Many Prickled Thing

Most weeks, Mr. DD, his brother and our future sister-in-law and I try to get together for dinner or drinks at Chez Prawn after the bedtime of She Who Must Be Obeyed just to keep up with what’s going on and to demolish bottles of wine. I may start referring to these get-togethers as Evenings of Knowledge, because we will inevitably, in the course of our conversations, have to go to Wikipedia 3-4 times.

Last evening’s conversation turned to Mother’s Day and the fact that the American holiday is celebrated the second Sunday of May while the British one is tied into Lent. (the 4th Sunday after, apparently) According to the mighty Wiki, British Mother’s Day is actually tied to a Roman festival honouring Juno, mother of the gods. The US celebration is loosely based on the British one, although it was started after the American Civil War in order to rally woman to an anti-war stance.*

This is my first Mother’s Day. My induction last year fell on Mothering Sunday and I naively believed that being induced might result in, oh, I don’t know, AN ACTUAL BIRTH, so I was kind of looking forward to becoming a mother on Mother’s Day. This morning, by the time I woke up, my daughter was already down for her morning nap after having emptied the dishwasher, taken out the recycling, cleaned the kitchen and made me tea all while her father sat on his ass on the couch and scratched himself. Well, according to him, anyhow.

My favorite Mother’s Day story, which I might have told before, but can’t find in my archives anywhere, takes place the year I was about 5 or 6. During the annual Mother’s Day church service, all of the children in the congregation were invited to the front of the sanctuary to choose a colourful plant to take back to their mothers. Whoever did the purchasing of said plants must have had a momentary brain lapse, because in between the little impatiens and petunias, there was a single cactus.

I’ll give you two guesses as to who got the cactus.

I got an email from my mother this morning.

“I was just looking at Ms. Cactus yesterday and thinking about how lucky I was to have a daughter who, at the tender age of whatever, had the foresight to realize what a great choice this was. :) (But truly, I wonder what on earth made you choose a cactus over all the other colorful, flowerage available.)”**

Well, it might have seemed like a rather contrary choice at the time, but all those other kids can totally suck it. Because while those petunias and impatiens all met a quick, neglected death in someone’s kitchen window, my cactus (which was no bigger than an adult thumb) now looks like THIS. One wonders why the cactus industry (if there is such a thing) has never tried to capitalize on the symbolism. “Roses wither in days. Nothing says eternal love quite like something that is short, squat, spiky and hangs on despite the fact that you only water it once a year. Plus, the cats won’t eat it.™”

I hope that one day, the Prawn will give me a Mother’s Day cactus that I can look at as a reminder of her love for years to come, free from the threat of drought or being the salad course.

*The other two items that we looked up had to do with the word “nee” (inserted after a woman’s married name and before her maiden one.) and Jewish holidays. We run the conversational gamut on Evenings of Knowledge.

**I probably was kind of fascinated with the idea of a plant that could hurt people.