#50 Be Given or Buy Myself a Big Bunch of Pink Tulips

Mother's Day has always been an especially difficult time for me.

As an adolescent girl, as far as I could see I was the ONLY girl in the world who didn't have a mother. I felt so sad to watch my friends showering their own mothers with cards, flowers, special meals and gifts. I suffered many school art projects in the Spring involving making some gift that would invariably end up in the garbage, many rehearsals in church and school choirs of songs to be preformed for an audience of everyone else's parents.

The one thought that got me through that particular holiday each year was the idea that I may not be able to have a mother, but that I would someday be a mother myself.

I got married and we started trying for a baby two months later.

Enter eight years of doctor's appointments, all sorts humiliating tests, ovarian cysts, miscarriages and mystery fertility issues, all while watching my friends become mothers themselves, some of them as many as five times over.

Oh the world can seem a cruel place on Mother's Day.

Then, in November 2010, my life changed. I wrote a very tentative email to a friend who had just had a baby herself tearfully admitting that I was imagining having pregnancy symptoms. She very matter of factly replied "Sounds like you're knocked up to me. Go and get two pregnancy tests and make a doctor's appointment." So that's what I did. And suddenly, I was a mother. A mother, in charge of an entire tiny person. And as she grew inside me, so did my heart. And it continues, if she's not happy, I'm not happy. If she needs something, I am determined to get it.

So yeah, I got my big bunch of pink Mother's day tulips this year. I also got cards and jewelry. But the very best gift I could ever have gotten was just being able to celebrate Mother's Day with my precious little peanut.