Mother's Day is coming up, in case it's not on your radar. It's this Sunday, and guess what the local soccer league decided to do? They scheduled a make-up game smack in the middle of the day on Sunday.

Yes, on Mother's Day, they expect us to do what we so often do: give up a day that's supposed to be a day of rest and relaxation--sacrifice what we might like to do--in order to sit on a lawn chair and root for the team in blue.

Maybe that's at the root of motherhood: sacrifice.

Silly me, I was thinking that mothers on Mother's Day could kick up their feet for a while, read a book, maybe even be alone. But that's the exact opposite of what a mother is. A woman is a mother precisely because there are other people in her life to whom she is fully committed. She wouldn't qualify to celebrate Mother's Day if she hadn't give birth to future swimmers, soccer or softball players.

So in a depressing kind of way, maybe that's exactly what a mother should be doing on Mother's Day--sitting alongside soccer and softball fields, on the bleachers at swim meets, or rooting for her sons on basketball courts.

This life of small sacrifices starts for biological parents with sharing one's own body. Upon delivery, regardless of how one becomes a parent, it becomes a series of sacrifices that never ends but only changes--giving up sleep, space, freedom to decide one's own schedule, and in a way, sacrificing your heart:

"Making the decision to have a child-it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."--Elizabeth Stone

More thoughts on the sacrifice of motherhood (I haven't checked sources, only blindly plucked these from the Internet like any other surfer):

"A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie." ~Tenneva Jordan

"She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along." ~Margaret Culkin Banning

"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child."
~Sophia Loren, Women and Beauty

"A mother who is really a mother is never free."-- Honore' de Balzac

"By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class." -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Hmph. I had been thinking I might just skip the soccer game and stay home with a good book and some hot tea.

Perhaps instead, on Mother's Day, I should haul out my lawn chair...and be a mom.