The Garden Gloves

Addison is one of those kids who is hard to describe. You just have to meet him. He has one of those magnetic personalities that draws people to him and makes them remember him. I guess you could call it charisma. Trey has called him monsieur le maire ("Mr. Mayor") from the time he was young enough to smile at passersby simply because he was a little politician. Wherever he goes he has a beaming grin and a friendly question for every new person he meets.

I had to share this story on the blog because I don't want to forget its sweetness and the true dramatic irony -- in the classic sense -- of motherhood that it emphasized at such a poignant moment, Mother's Day.

This weekend I flew solo while Trey was in Atlanta visiting his mom, and by Sunday morning I was worn ragged. Between the incessant questions, frequent squabbles, and general exuberant energy inherent to three children under the age of 8 my nerves and patience were in tatters. I'd battled a child-started rogue car alarm while I was two baseball fields away dropping off a son at baseball practice only to discover that said left-handed son had forgotten an essential left-handed glove, which incidentally you can't borrow from a team mate since no one else is left-handed and had a nameless female offspring of mine surreptitiously eat the tops off 4 Oscar Meyer hotdogs right out of the package in Walmart. That was just Saturday. Juggling the full-time duties of caring for three small children, the baseball schedule of two young boys, and trying to get work done for one paying day job was definitely too ambitious. So when Addison burst into the bedroom at some ungodly hour on Sunday morning, I was pretty much dead to the world.

"Here, Mom. Happy Mother's Day!" I blinked through bleary eyes and saw the fuzzy image of Addison, with Davis at his side, proffering what was clearly the gift he'd made at school. For the past few days he'd been telling me how excited he was to give me my present. He had guarded the secret vigilantly, proudly sharing it with a select few, and here he was, like Christmas morning, eager with anticipation for me to enjoy his treasure.

I propped myself up and blinked. He was holding a clay flower pot decorated with foam dragonflies and ladybugs. Inside the pot were gardening gloves and a popsicle stick with wings glued to it -- a butterfly. "Oh thank you!" I said, pulling the gloves out of the pot to try them on. And immediately I saw the problem. Addison had unknowingly chosen two right-handed gloves.

And so I flipped one of them over, put it on my left hand and hugged him. "They're perfect," I whispered in his ear.