I am ready for a new kind of Mother's Day

If you are a parent like me, the last 14 months almost broke you.

This time last year we were well into a pandemic, already exhausted (especially if we were the mothers of small children) and heartbroken. If we were lucky, we waved to our own mothers on Mother's Day, gingerly and from a distance. If you're like me, you spent last Mother's Day crying, because you missed your own mother and because being a mother had become intensely hard beyond any imagining and there seemed to be no end in sight to the guilt, to the too muchness of everything.
A year later: Some things are better. I am endlessly grateful that my own little tribe got through. My family is vaccinated and on Mother's Day, my husband and two kids and I are going to see my mother-in-law and my own mother, and throw a big brunch, and do some of the delightful tender work of reconnecting. My partner makes a mean frittata. Maybe some flowers will be exchanged.