How to Pick Out the Perfect Mother's Day Present (ideally without bleeding on it)

There is blood on my shirt. Red is a primary color, like yellow. Red and yellow look good together. Blood and flowers look nice together. But more about the blood later. Let’s talk about the flowers.

So there is a proper way to pick out a Valentine’s Day gift. Wait, wait, not Valentine’s Day. I have said that three times today—I am talking about Mother’s Day. It is hard to keep track of what holiday, because there are just so many generic holidays that involve stores scraping together a bunch of sad looking roses and cards with elegant text.

So, there is a proper way to pick out a Mother’s Day gift. And it does not involve those droopy, half closed roses that Walmart is selling by the hundreds, which sadly will never unfurl their petals because they are sad droopy Walmart roses. I don’t care much for the other weird trinkets there either, and I know what I am talking about because I am a mother.

A zinnia is also a highly practical and dramatic flower, although not quite as dramatic...you will see what I am talking about...read on...

So, again, there is a proper way to pick out a Mother’s Day gift. Unfortunately no children know this, so sometimes mothers simply have to take matters into their own hands. They have to instruct the family on how to go about success, and that is what I did today.

The first step is to find a friendly farmer. Specifically, this needs to be a farmer with a very large, very impressive, very beautiful field of sunflowers. Sunflowers are the perfect flower. They grow in sand. They grow in scorching humidity. They grow amid swarms of insects. They grow straight through summer with big, smiling faces that worship the sun. Every mother respects that sort of practicality. Also, they are enormous, and that is dramatic. Mothers are used to drama.

Give me my toy!
No, give me my toy!
I’m never ever, ever going to play with you again!
No, I’m never ever, ever going to play with you again!

Drama. So much freaking drama. Mothers even learn to omit expletives for words like “freaking” because they are practical. Practicality and drama—that is a mother’s life; that is a sunflower’s life.

So, back to the procedure. First, I found my friendly farmer with the really impressive sunflower field. Then, I told my family we were going there. My husband knows how I feel about sunflowers, he did what he was told. Then I packed up a picnic lunch of egg salad and cucumber salad, because they are yellow and green—the colors that surround you when you are having a picnic in a sunflower field.

Alright, so the color coordination thing was purely luck. It just so happened that first thing this morning the only protein I had in the house was eggs, so I made egg salad, because mothers are practical. And I happen to have a lot of cucumbers. I already have three jars of pickles, what the hell else do you do with a cucumber other than make salad?

So we made the drive to the field with our egg salad and cucumber salad. The sun was beating down like it was cooking us for lunch and that field was the sun’s special slow cooker. Those devout sunflowers were too busy worshiping the sun to care. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the sunflowers while I broke open our matching yellow and green food. And then came the red.

A nose bleed. My damn nose. It is a failure to the rest of my face. It had been a good two weeks since its last let down, and the rest of me was beginning to think the thing had cleaned up its act. But no. And no tissue, no idle piece of scrap paper, no receipt, no brown paper wrapping—nothing. Nothing but my shirt. And so red infiltrated our color scheme.

But really red is the color of childbirth, and of life itself. It is the color of love. And there is no greater act of love than motherhood. So there it was smeared across my shirt in a sea of yellow and green sun worship. It had its place.

I started a bit of flower worship. I examined all the stages of life: the newborn bud that was yet unfurled, the adolescent with its inner parts still tightly wound, then the pregnant flower full of open parts dropping yellow pollen, and lastly the adult flower with her petals gently beginning to flutter away.

The children each picked me a flower, and I picked one, and each stage of a flower's life is lovely.

So lovely that I spent the last six hours checking in on them in their place on my dining room table. I had been admiring all their drama and practically in the different shades of light as the sun slipped lower in the sky. And I’ve been sneezing. I may have just sneezed my hundredth time, but it doesn’t matter because they are motherhood encapsulated.

And it is so beautiful.