Family. That is what holidays have traditionally been about. Father helps children celebrate Mother's Day by purchasing a card or two, flowers, a gift.

Maybe he helps your son and daughter prepare a breakfast complete with your favorite French toast, bacon, and eggs.

Today, moving beyond divorce, holidays have changed. This Mother's Day begins with getting out of bed and feeding the cat and the six little kittens now crying for their kitty food, walking the dog, making my bed, starting another load of endless laundry, and watching the weather channel. I watch the weather channel the way some people listen to the news or radio.

I turn the oven on to broil and I grab some Lenders bagels out of the fridge and split them with my fingers. I place them on my mother's 50-year-old pizza pan and slide the pan into the oven. I wait.

I open the fridge to look for my caffeine fix of sweet tea, and the pitcher is empty of anything except a single swallow. I grab my second choice, the kids' Pepsi. I turn and kick the door shut with my right foot. I pull the bagels out of the oven. I yell, "Breakfast!"

Happy Mother's Day to me.

There is no answer. I yell again, "Breakfast!"

I hear shuffling and laughter.

"Mom!"

"What?" I say. "Breakfast!" My frustration and self pity increasing.

My daughter calls me to her room. I stomp back to the hall muttering to myself about ungrateful children and my life without a spouse and no support, and then I open the bedroom door.

Her eyes wide and sparkling. My son stands beside her barely able to contain his laughter.

They pull their hands out from behind their back. She extends a large pink construction paper creation in front of me with pink paper roses glued to it. She has made a card. It is beautiful. My son has made me three Lego puppies.

Since the divorce (two and a half years ago) and in the last year, I have discovered something quite wonderful. It is that each and everything that we do is important. So, consequently, I am no longer in a rush. Seems I spent 12 years rushing, rushing, rushing to please, to prepare, to arrive on time, to make sure "they" were on time, to get things done. And it nearly killed me.

Today, I take pleasure in the smallest of things. I simply look at the job at hand and begin. I cut linings for my friend's drawers today. I did not over think it. I did not look at all the drawers and think, "Oh, my God, there are so many of them."

She gave me the assignment, and I poured myself into it. I sat in the sun at my "work" station, which was a bench on her deck. I sat on a cooler with wheels, and I had a razor blade and a block of wood, an ink pen and a tape measure to complete my work.

I sat and drank a Smirnoff lemonade thing and began the task at hand. I did not care if there were rolls and rolls of this shelf liner that needed to be measured and cut and that the dimensions had to be 19 ¼ for some and 8 ¾ for others. I spread the material and measured and marked and cut using a quarter round to hold down the liner. I ran my blade as close to the quarter round as I could, paying attention to the fact that I wanted the edges to be smooth and not ragged.

I accomplished my task.

When the kids spill Pepsi or milk. When my dog gets sick and throws upon my floor or when the kitchen pipe under the sink leaks and I have to stop my current task or effort to relax and must stoop, bend, twist, unscrew, wipe, I do it willingly and almost happily.

I am a grateful Samurai, today. A soldier with Krud Kutter and Lysol as my weapons.

There is this hot little Italian named Bertazzoni. She is my friend's new best friend. Cooking. It's a great way to begin a relationship. It's a great way to help heal old wounds.

She cooks. Regularly. And now that her new hot little Italian has arrived, airfreight from the Old Country, she promises mouth watering delicacies that will, as she says, change me forever.

It has lots of knobs. She's still reading the manual, but she doesn't want to rush it. She tells me that she wants to understand exactly what happens and why it happens and how it happens. She can do this with her Bertazzoni.

It's a $12,000 gas stove. But to call it a "stove" is to demean this invaluable 48-inch stainless steel warm, ready to perform piece of artistry. She had a brother in the gas industry so she got the stove for half price, plus shipping and handling from the "Old Country."

I came to her home today to see it.

It moved me. Six burners, and each different dependent on the goal of the chef. One for bringing water to boil almost instantaneously. One for a slow, steady heat that will gradually take your entrée up to the perfect temperature and consistency. One that provides a way to almost double boil.

There is no husband like a Bertozzoni. No man will ever understand our need for the perfect temperature, for the perfect weight and height and stiff endurance in the good times and the bad. No, no man can compete.

Cook.

I am a woman in a very small kitchen with an ancient electric stove that offers little solace for me, but I manage to create my famous enchiladas and lasagna and even the crust less cinnamon and powdered sugar dusted French toast.

I don't have a Bertozzoni. I have a crappy $200 Kenmore, but it will do.

Have you ever planted a garden and followed all the garden etiquette and made sure that the soil was fertilized and softened to encourage the growth of the new seed or tiny seedling? Have you pulled your children out from their warm beds to rush barefooted and still in their PJs to see the first tiny tomato bursting forth before all the others?

What is it to grow a garden? To till the soil and fight the rocky ground and force the it to make something grow from next to nothing?

As I came into the spring of my first year away from my crazy ex, I decided that the children and I must grow a garden. I took them to the farmer's co-op and together we selected our tiny plants that would entrust their miniscule lives to us for the next several months.

We chose Big Boys (I'd heard they were very good tomatoes) and Earlies and Tommie Toes (what we called them when I was a child). We picked peppers and cucumbers and squash. I let my children decide.

Caty and Joe became excited and began to pick flowers and leafy green things that would help make our tiny house a home. And...I let them. \No rational evaluation of what would or would not grow. They picked their flowers and their vegetables and together we took our bounty to the check out stand.

And when the total came to well over a hundred dollars, I paid the bill with a smile on my face. We were putting our hands in rich dirt and fingering green leaves of various plants. And it all felt so good.

In Middle Tennessee, the ground is filled with rocks. We sit on top of limestone, I think, and the first few inches of soil usually yield a dead end in the form of hard, impenetrable bedrock.

Springtime in Middle Tennessee is beautiful. The house I live in had flowers planted already, but for two springs they haven't bloomed. My landlady tells me that they are Irises. But, as I said, they haven't bloomed, so how would I know?

Irises come in many colors. The prettiest I think is the periwinkle blue (don't you just love that word — periwinkle — I love saying it). But for two springs, I've seen no blooms.

That changed this morning, a morning of my third spring. I'd seen it coming because I watched some green leaves sprout, thicken, and become stalks. Every morning, the stalks grew a little taller, and eventually I began to see the tips begin to swell. There was something good coming. I could see it, and I could feel it. 

Your recovery from a divorce is much like my Irises. The roots are still there, and the plant is living, drinking and growing, but simply not producing a flower. It may take a year, two years even longer, but as long as you're still there, standing and living, you're okay. 

What you will discover along the way is that you eventually will not feel quite so forlorn. You will notice that you are smiling a bit more, and that what used to bring you joy seems to be gradually easing itself back into your heart.  

A beautiful sky painted in dozens of colors that nearly moves you to tears. A sudden breeze that waves branches of trees and makes your hair blow around your face like an actress in a movie. A butterfly. Four-week-old kittens. Your favorite song suddenly playing on the radio and so you turn it up and sing along and feel alive and free and, dare I say it, happy. 

After Hurricane Katrina blew my life apart, but gave me the opportunity to escape my prison sentence with Stinky, I was in what some people call a bit of a state of shock. I was traumatized. Yep, that storm blew my house, my children's school, and my office away, and Stinky had knocked me clean stupid.

So, though it's been two and a half years, sometimes I long for those first months (okay, it was actually a year) of being so confused and unhappy and scared that I couldn't hold down a full time job and was afraid to really do anything more than get up, get the kids to school, and brush my teeth.

That's when I found my new friends: Crown Royal and Mimosa. Mmmm. I had no money, but I actually bought the complete collection of all six seasons of Sex In the City and after the kids were in school, I would come home and I would put in the next DVD open a bottle of Frexinet Brut or Extra Dry, mix a mimosa and sit down to plunge into complete oblivion watching four hip chicks living their lives in the Big Apple.

Ahhh. Those were the days. By noon, the champagne was gone along with a king sized bar of Hershey's dark chocolate, I would lay down and sleep for two hours, awake refreshed, brush my teeth, again, and go get the kids.

Then after baths and homework and giggles and stories of their day, and once they were both snuggled in for the night, I would shower, slip into my bed and put in the next DVD and hit play. I would also begin drinking the four Crown Royal highballs that would lull me into a deep sleep, so deep that I would not have the nightmares that had plagued me the first few weeks after my departure from the coast of Mississippi.

Parenting is tough, but parenting alone is nearly impossible. Unfortunately, we can't give up. I mean I guess we could, and obviously some parents do. But the bottom line is that, once divorced, we have to keep on parenting. And it is definitely a job better shared by two.

My daughter flipped out on me. She is almost 13, and she has simply gone over the deep end. What went wrong? Don't know. Hell, she's just a kid. But she has gotten an idea in her head that she's in charge of her life and that I do not have any right to tell her what to do.

How does this happen?

You give and you give and you give of your time, your love, your compassion, your understanding. You try to give them most of what they need and some of what they want. But somehow they still feel deprived. Somehow they are completely convinced that you have ruined their happiness.

Ah, there's the rub.

And how do you change this?

She threw her brother's $400 Wii on the ground (twice) to prove to him what it feels like to lose something you love. In her case, it was DirecTV. But she'd been behaving so badly that I had to take away something for punishment. The following morning she was acting like someone who was demonically possessed and was refusing to go to school. She was practically foaming at the mouth. No, I'm serious.

I can't exactly manhandle her; she's my child. But I did threaten to spank her (something that almost never happens), and eventually I did. I got "the belt" and I popped her a few times. She was still uncooperative, so I called the school and she ended up talking to the counselor. The counselor told her she didn't have to go to school, but would need to return tomorrow.

So the school counselor helped her get what she wanted. And worse, when she went to school the following day, they asked her about her spanking and whether or not she had any marks. Good God!

Keep the ring! Wear it, don't wear it. But for God's sake, keep the ring! Sell it, have it made into a necklace.

Was your ring important to you? What does a wedding ring mean? You belong to someone? Wait, that would make it more like a dog collar and a rabies license wouldn't it? If lost, please return to Mr. so-and-so at such-and-such address.

Okay, now I may just puke. Did I say keep the ring?

But, you can throw away reminders, photos, papers. I tossed and burned those, too. It made me feel good. It was like shaking off the last really awful memories of a very painful and disappointing marriage. I was glad I did that. 

Of course, what about the photos with your ex and your children? What's that old saying, oh yeah, "that's like throwing out the baby with the bathwater." Yeah, I held on to those photos. It used to hurt to look at them. It doesn't anymore.

When you can look at the photos or the items that came into your life while you were married without feeling pain or sorrow or regret, you are healed.

I don't seem to care about anything related to that part of my life anymore. I am moving forward and onward and upward. I am no longer "anyone's" possession. 

Nobody owns me. I am my own person. I am free.

And, my fellow FWW visitors and bloggers .... me likey, me likey a whole lot! 

No one to judge me. No one to bitch because there isn't any tea made. No one to expect, demand, blame, cage.

We went to see "Menopause, The Musical" in Nashville last week. The four women in the play were talented, good singers, good actresses. It worked.

But I wasn't overly fond of it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Even though it had a few good lines and one very good Tina Turner impression, it was slightly annoying — four women singing new lyrics to old songs playing off the fun and the misery of going through menopause.

Had this musical come out in the 1970s, it would have been much more effective. The topic of menopause wasn't polite table talk then. Today, you can't even turn on the TV (day or night) without hearing about our periods and birth control and erectile dysfunction — please! 

So, four women singing and dancing and making fun of menopause just didn't do it for me.

Another problem with the play was that it offered up four female stereotypes that are very, very tired. The corporate executive (sure, she was African American), the Susan Lucci aging-actress type, the Iowa housewife visiting the Big Apple, and the hippie Earth mother.

The audience was filled with what we used to call "gray hairs." It was mostly women and only a few brave men laughed and seemed to find the play hilarious. So I wondered what was wrong with me.

Jaded, I suppose. That and the fact that women are so wonderfully complicated, yet simple and unique. Every woman I have ever truly loved had her own special offering for this Earth. No woman I ever loved remotely behaved as any one of the four women on stage. 

I am a furniture mover. My mother was a furniture mover, too. Every three months or so, I rearrange the furniture in my living room, my bedrooms, my kids' bedrooms. I don't know why I do it — I like change, I guess. And not just a change in where a piece of furniture sits but also a change in perspective.

But my mother lived what you would call the typical lifestyle of a fifties mom — had a career as a pharmacist in the Army, met and married my dad, received an honorable discharge, and began having babies.

She never worked again. I have worked my entire life.

So, though she did enter the military at 19 and she did become a pharmacist (which is considered a respectable career even today), she stopped her progression to marry and have children — to be a housewife.

Secretly, though, maybe she, too, craved change. Maybe that is why she moved the furniture around in her own house — to make it seem to appear that she was changing something.

In my world, I focus daily to change something or someone — to help, to assist, to further along something, anything. I want to move things around in my life and forward. I want change, and I like it daily.

When I do something different, try a new move, I am introducing myself to a change, I am moving outside of my comfort zone.

Sometimes we stay married simply because the idea of such a drastic change is more than we want to think about much less deal with. We stay in a marriage that is not fulfilling our spirit and our desire to progress, to move forward. We don't take the steps to change it. We're comfortable, maybe. We're certainly familiar. Known vs. the unknown.

But what are we waiting for? Why do we think it will change, he will change, if we wait just one more day?