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.

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.

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!

In this very sensitive-to-spaying-and-neutering world and in view of all the unwanted dogs and cats in the world, I must beg your forgiveness - I let my cat get pregnant. She wasn't supposed to be in heat, but I shouldn't have let her out. But I did and she is.

But, oh, the sweetness of it all. It is an indulgence that I have let myself experience. In my life of so many losses, I have allowed my cat to grow new lives inside her belly. I have allowed myself to put my hands on her stomach and feel the growing life inside and then as the weeks passed to feel those lives move and kick. One, two, three ... I think I count four.

I have allowed myself to leave work early a few days ago because I sensed that her time was near, and was glad to know I was right as I lifted the tiny lives from my bed (yes, my bed) and the floor and moved them to the box I had carefully prepared for this event. And I gave in to the luxury of the celebration of life and called my best friend to say, "they're here -- they've been born."

And I was delighted when she, too, left her job and rushed to see the new lives that had come to live on Kenneth Avenue with my children and a dog named Brittney, a now mother cat and some sea monkeys.

I sterilized the knife and cut their cords and their birth sacks and helped mama cat adjust as this was a new world for her too, and I smiled as her instincts took over and she cleaned and nursed and settled into her new role as a mother.

They sleep by my bed in their box with a heating pad underneath to keep them extra warm, and I hear the mother gently coo and encourage her new babies to eat and cuddle and finally sleep. I hear her purr. I hear the tiniest of mews coming from the so-very-small mouths of the six new lives that have come into our world.

My brother thinks I'm too lenient with my children. I love him, but he and his wife never had kids. They've been married 28 years. Each has had the same job for nearly 20 years. They live in a home where you can see where the vacuum cleaner made its last stroke.

This is not the real world.

I live in a world filled with a dining table that serves as a place to put everything — bills, toys, drawings, reading glasses, books, clothes. My floor by the front door has a litter of shoes on both sides: tennis shoes, a pair of high heels, sandals, and flip-flops in sizes 7, 8, and 9.

My wooden floors are scuffed.

There is always some sort of sheet covering two of the three cushions of the only new purchase I have made since moving here after Hurricane Katrina — my lovely, comfy couch. The sheet protects my sofa from my dog Brittney's claws and hair and doggy smell, or so I think.

(Oh, and as a matter of reference, the dog came with her name — I rescued her from an abusive 26-year-old male neighbor — and that was the name she'd had for a year and a half.)

We run out of milk. There is often no bread, and we've actually had Edy's Rich & Creamy mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner. Yep. That's the truth.

And when my son got in trouble for threatening to hurt another boy that he's been in and out of fights with since the beginning of school and got two days of suspension, I punished him with five licks, (not in anger), and no supper.

I felt bad for him because I know that the boy in question is a pain in the ass and has been for my son all year. But, my 11-year-old son has to learn to live within the confines of society, and there is a zero tolerance in schools for hitting or threatening to hit.

Just when you start feeling sorry for yourself because you barely have enough money to pay rent and both kids need new clothes and you're wondering how in the heck you're going to find a home for six new kittens, life smacks you right upside the head.

My friend's granddaughter died Wednesday. She was seven months old. SIDS, perhaps. The autopsy report has not been released.

Life: It's a fragile, fleeting, passing thing.

In the midst of frustration, because my 11- and 12-year-old cannot go one day without quarreling over something, I have to stop and realize how blessed I am to have two healthy children who are able to quarrel. When I want to complain because I've been hacking like a smoker (I don't smoke) because of all the Middle Tennessee pollen that is in every single breath I take, I have to stop and be grateful that I am able to breathe, able to cough, able to have itchy, swelling eyes and a runny nose.

Many years ago when I finally learned that life is all the good and all the bad rolled into one, I felt that I had discovered the secret. If I could look at all things that happen to me and allow them to happen without my feeling cursed, singled out, plotted upon, then I would be able to accept whatever happened to me and roll with it. But, losing a child — I don't know how a mother recovers from that loss. As tough and strong as I like to think I am, would I be able to move forward with life if my son or daughter died?

We've all heard about the seven most difficult things we can face in life: Divorce, job change or loss, relocation, marriage, pregnancy, illness or death, but we don't all have to face these.

But there have to be some guidelines in this whole divorce thing when children are involved. Here are my personal rules for sharing my kids with my ex.

Guideline One: I do not answer the phone if the caller ID says it's Stinky.

I allow both of my children to call their father whenever they want. And he is allowed to call them as well. But they have to answer the phone when he calls.

Guideline Two: I refuse to listen to the sound of Stinky's voice.

My son likes to talk to Stinky hands free, and that means he likes to put Stinky on speakerphone. That's a problem for me. Joseph says it makes it like his dad is right there beside him. Admittedly, it's not like I can argue with that. But I insist if he is going to talk to his father in this way, that he do so in his room with the door closed.

Guideline Three: I don't suggest the kids call Stinky, and do not make them talk to Stinky unless they want to.

My daughter talks to her father much less and tells me that she doesn't really want to call him. She doesn't usually call him at all. However, when he calls, he asks my son to put her on the phone. If Caty wants to talk to her father, she does. However, if she doesn't want to talk to him, that is her choice as well.

Guideline Four: No voice messaging at home.

Not hearing Stinky's voice is definitely my preference, but when I had voice mail on our home phone, that gave him the opportunity to put his voice in a place that I might actually inadvertently wind up hearing it. That had to stop. I minimized my home phone service to the very basic service without voice mail. And I got myself a cell phone, finally.

Since the divorce, Stinky likes to make a trip once a year up here to show his gracious generosity by using his credit card to purchase socks, underwear, shoes, and school supplies for his son and daughter. He will not pay one red cent in child support throughout the year, but in August he gets to come up here and play hero for the day. Last year, I did something I never thought I would do - I took advantage of his credit at a major department store. See, since he was with me, but hated to shop, we just filled out the credit card form right then and there and the lovely clerk gave me a slip of paper to use until his card arrived in the mail.

Did I mention that Stinky is a little on the ignorant side? I think he just doesn't care enough to pay attention sometimes. If it isn't something he is interested in, he ignores it. Shopping is one of those things.

The following week, and after he'd left town, my daughter had decided she didn't exactly like a particular outfit and Joseph still did not have his much-needed shoes. So, I did the unthinkable, but, trust me, I did a whole lot of thinking before I promptly marched myself up to the department store and exchanged the one outfit for three more, bought my son's shoes and a couple of more shirts and bought myself a few things, too, using that little slip of paper. After all, the last name on the card was "Woodard," and I still use that as my legal name (for the kids' sake).

In South Louisiana and along the gulf of the Mississippi, they call it the "Po-Po." Yes, ladies, that is correct. I called the police on Stinky.

Last holiday season he came to see his children, and I allowed him to stay in our home, much to the chagrin of my brother. But, I asked him, which is better: the kids in some cheap motel alone with Stinky during the holidays or here safe in their own home? That quieted him.

But of course, as it turned out, he was right to be unhappy with my decision. Stinky had not been in our home for a full 24 hours when he lost his temper and began grabbing his 10-year-old son trying to manhandle him and give him a spanking for his having had the audacity to "tease" his father during a game of monopoly. A leopard doesn't change his spots.

I, however, had learned that when Stinky becomes angry and violent, intervention is simply fuel to the fire. I was able to step in and quietly and calmly say, "Okay, now let's all settle down." My son was crying. My daughter and her friend were crying.

And suddenly it hit me — what was I thinking having this abusive, non-paying-child-support S.O.B. in my home? Sure, it was the holidays, but my charitable spirit for Stinky just went out the window. But here's where it changed.

Instead of losing my own temper and becoming emotional, I calmly told him that I was taking my daughter's friend home and that my daughter was coming with me. Stinky and my son were talking now as though they were just a normal father and son, though in my heart of hearts I knew with Stinky it would never be normal.

Once I arrived at my daughter's friend's house, I promptly telephoned the police (non-emergency number) and told them of my situation and asked them if they could come and pay a brief visit while I kicked Stinky out of my house.