My best Mother's Day story

I didn't go in to see my boys this weekend, out of deference to their mother, who wanted to have them for Mother's Day weekend to herself (I had asked if she would prefer I postpone a week...). She has been a terrific mother to all three of my children, and I wanted to share with you the story I told my son, Dante, yesterday, that he had not heard before. My ex and I joked she had been saving it up for guilting purposes later in life.

When the boys (my twin sons) were still babies, they got sick with the flu. Dante, when he gets nausea, we have discovered, keeps throwing up and throwing up. Dehydration is always a concern. But this was the first time they had been sick, so we did not previously know this or how to deal with it...and it was the weekend of Mother's Day.

Elric was getting better, but Dante still seemed unable to stop thowing up. So, we took him to the emergency room, where they managed to get that under control, but they came to the conclusion he would need intravenous fluids, so they would need to keep him in the emergency room, overnight.

Jan, their mother, my ex, stayed with him. They put her up on a hospital bed in the ER and laid the sad-faced boy on her, face down, on her torso, then set to work getting the fluids back into him. Jan spent the night into Mother's Day, laying on a hospital bed with a softly whimpering baby atop her, safe in her arms, as fluids dripped into him to restore his strength.

I know of no more vivid depiction of a Mother's love than that. And people have asked me why I didn't try to take the kids when we divorced? I was a lousy husband, and when I wasn't working 16 hours a day or moving three thousand miles to maintain my obligations, a good father...but there was no way I could compete with her zeal for the job and it would have been both wrong of me, and tactically stupid to fight with her over it.

Happy Mother's Day to mothers everywhere. Thanks to Anna Jarvis, from just down the road from where I am sitting this moment, who in Grafton, West Virginia, started the modern observance of such a holiday in the US.

Oh, and to my own Mom...