Life has a way of sneaking up on you if you aren’t paying attention and apparently, I haven’t been. Which is why I was rather surprised when my husband texted me the other day and asked if there was anything special I’d like for mother’s day this year.

I had completely spaced on the fact Mother’s day is this weekend. Whoops.

While it’s lovely to know my husband is on the ball and thinking of me on behalf of our youngest son(s), I have a bigger problem at the moment. What do I get MY mother for her special day?

I really wish I was one of those people who are either hyper organized and have all their gifts purchased for all holidays a year in advance or one of those people who think buying half wilted gas station roses at the last minute is entirely acceptable. However, I am neither.

I am gift-less and in a bit of a time crunch. And when that happens, there is only one thing to do: Turn to the Internet for inspiration.

I found none of that.

Spring fever, I have it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been freaking out lately that later this year I’ll be 37 years old. Maybe it’s because my oldest daughter only has two more years of high school left and we’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time sifting through university catalogues.  Or maybe it’s because lately I’ve been feeling a little bit bored.

There are days my children look at me like I am the most boring person in the world and it is all they can do to hold back the yawns as I speak to them.

Those are the days I look at my life and wonder how I got where I am. I still remember standing in front of my own mom and trying to stifle a yawn while thinking she was positively the most boring person in the entire world.

She got more interesting the older I became. Weird how that works, right?

There was a time I could touch my toes, run a six minute kilometre, and shoot hoops more accurately than my big brother. I was an athlete. I loved sports, I took care of my body, and I broke and set all sorts of sports records for where I lived.

That was before I discovered booze, 24-hour Chinese take out food, and sex. Which by itself could be considered athletic, and goodness knows I put a lot of effort in perfecting my skill, but when you combine it with it’s natural conclusion of children, it all equaled one thing:

It’s no secret that once upon a time I was a real dork. According to my children, I still am. Hah! If only they knew me back in the day. I’d show them what a real dork was. That would teach them.

Wait a second….

My point is I wasn’t exactly a shining example of a cool teenager. John Hughes wasn’t writing his movies about my teenaged years. I spent the bulk of my adolescence hiding in the industrial wing of my large urban high school, carrying around a notebook and refusing to make eye contact with the general student body. The only people who knew I existed were the ones who mocked my slippers and the stoners who tried to steal them.

When I was nine years old I met a girl who had spiked blue hair and the biggest cornflower blue eyes I’d ever seen.

I caught her peering into my bedroom window just as I had stripped off my clothes and was standing in the middle of my bedroom wearing a pair of pink polka dotted granny panties.

I screamed, she smiled and my brother, who had set up the entire prank, laughed until he almost peed himself.

My blue-eyed spy turned into my bestest friend. We were inseparable, even when her parents moved from one location to the next; we managed to find a way to spend weekends and summers together.

She was my maid of honor at my wedding and I thought we’d be best friends until the day we died.

I was wrong.

There are some things as a parent, heck, as a grown adult human being that I never ever needed to know.

One of those things? The fact that my daughter has this weird propensity to make the dreaded duck face every time she is put in front of a camera.

How do I know this you ask? Facebook slaps me upside the head with it every time I log in and find myself staring at my daughter either trying to give the entire world cyber kisses or doing some weird animal imitation thing involving quacking. Either way, Facebook is showing me I’ve failed as a mother.

I was once told by another blogger that because I write about more than just my special needs son(s) I could not be considered a special needs blogger. That while I may have been granted a window seat into that community I’d never be allowed off the bus.

At first, I was indignant. And then I was mad. And then I just became thoughtful.

For years I never gave much thought to the reflection staring back at me in my mirror. I’d fuss over my makeup, lament over one bad hair day after another and hope I didn’t grow any new pimples or chin whiskers from the last time I looked in the mirror.

I never paid any attention to me. I wasn’t paying attention to who I was becoming with the choices I made, I wasn’t seeing the identity I had molded for myself.

You know when you meet someone and sparks fly and your whole world is suspended for those single perfect moments when you can sigh softly into their neck after a romantic kiss or catch their eye across the room and know instantly that you are both thinking the same thoughts?

I loved those moments.

So I married my moment maker and had his children. Life hasn’t been the same since.

My son stood at the foul line, waiting for the teams to line up around him. The score was tied, it was down to the last quarter and the winning team was going to move on to the championship game. An entire season of basketball, blood, sweat and a few tears had all added up to this moment, this game.

The crowd, filled with tired parents who had to drive through a blizzard that day just to be there, fell silent, half of them wishing my son well, half of them hoping he failed.

It was the battle of one small farming community against another and more than a few of the parents inside that gymnasium were reliving their own sport memories as my son took a few deep breaths to calm himself and then raised the ball to shoot towards victory.

And right before he was about to release the ball, the words “Mommy will still love you even if you miss!!” rang out like a bell and bounced off the gym walls.

The crowd was stunned and turned to see who would humiliate her kid in such a fashion at such a crucial time in the game.