Children do appreciate their mothers

Mothers. Where would we be without them? I suppose we wouldn’t be at all.
I am blessed with a great Mom. Due in large part to her love and parenting skills, I was a pretty good kid. I never got in trouble at school. I never stayed out late without calling. I never punched anybody in the nose.
However, no child is ever perfect, and there are some things I’d like to get off my chest.
In honor of my mother on Mother’s Day weekend, I hereby admit to staying up reading way past bedtime. I appreciate that her tolerance of this contributed to my lifelong love of reading.
I confess to whining about the unfair treatment of girls (me) versus boys (my three brothers) in our house. My parents did try to be fair, but they just weren’t always able to pull it off. However, I did take away the lesson that life is not always fair, which has most certainly proven to be true.
I also confess to using more than the allotted six squares of toilet paper on occasion. I rather doubt anyone else adhered to that rule, but most of the time I did. This was actually a great lesson in conservation in a very basic way.
The closer I get to the completion of my own primary role as mother, the more I appreciate those wise and wonderful things she did for me without my realizing it at the time.
Thank you, Mom, for helping me round out the bustline of my dress for the middle school dance with a little batting. More importantly, thank you for knowing how much it bothered me to be behind the other girls in that part of the development game.
Thank you for enrolling me in dance classes and for driving me to something like 8,799 of them. And thank you for knowing I didn’t need an audience at class, but would have been hugely disappointed if you had ever missed a performance.
Thank you for putting down your college books when I crept back to your room after supper to talk about nothing in particular. I confess that even at age 14 I needed reassuring that I still came in ahead of everything else in your life.
I may not have always appreciated that fact. I may not have always understood the arbitrary restrictions and rules. I may have argued, fussed and been otherwise resistant to doing as I was asked.
But Mom, I want you to know that I never once stepped on a crack.

Shari Trejo is the editorial assistant for The Sun. Her column runs once a month. She can be reached at shari_trejo@link.freedom.com or (850) 267-4555.