Was there ever such a fraught day for infertile women? Technically, I realize, I could have celebrated last year’s Mother’s Day, but that just felt like the worst kind of self-jinxing behavior & I skittered through the day, shivering every time I heard the words, and keeping one hand protectively hovering over my growing belly.

This year, I’m feeling overwhelmed with appreciation – for my own mother and my grandmothers and all of the women who have ‘mothered’ me in one sense or another throughout the years. But do I feel like someone should be appreciating me, and the work I do? Not so much – because I feel like I’m the one who’s been given the gift of being allowed to mother, so wanting a pat on the back for essentially eating a cookie someone handed me just feels like the grossest kind of greediness –the cookie is reward enough, and thank you!

(Besides which, Henry let me sleep last night, which feels like the best pat on the back ever.)

And while I don’t tend to wander through my days deliberately reliving all the bad of the last few years, this day still, apparently, has the capacity to make me feel all skittery and nervous. The Boy’s family doesn’t celebrate this holiday, so he asked if it would be a good idea for him to buy a card and sign Henry’s name to it – I told him that wouldn’t be necessary but that in a few years, if the boychick felt inclined to make me a mother’s day card with macaroni and elmer’s glue and the Boy discouraged said boychick from such an endeavor? That would be a bad idea.

So until that crayola+dyed macaroni day, I’ll consider myself more than adequately happy-mother’s-dayed by the slightly yogurt smeared grin on Henry’s face as I feed him his first breakfast of the day. I’ll consider myself appreciated plenty when he wakes me up at a decent hour by patting my face.  And I’ll offer up my sincere hope that every woman out there who longs to be a mother gets the chance this year.

In my own life, here’s to the doctors and donors and friends and family – and most especially to my husband – who made my dreams of motherhood come true.  Here’s to my own mom who modeled the very best of parenting for me, and who continues to inspire me with her courage in the face of difficulty and physical discomfort.  And here’s to the baby currently wiggling his way around my kitchen on his sleeper-clad belly (he slides delightfully easily on the wood floor!)  If not for all of these people in my life, this couldn’t be a happy day for me at all.

But it is, and so I’ll say it: Happy Mother’s Day.  I hope it is or at least that it will be, someday, for everyone reading this.