M is for the Many Sleepness Nights

My mom was in town last month. She dropped perhaps the most shocking revelation in my entire family history ever: She's never seen the original Star Wars movies in their entirety. If she had told me this five months ago, I would have called her a liar, right to her face, my own mother. How could someone who raised three boys and one girl in the 1970s and 80s not have seen the Star Wars movies? Get real, Mom.

Of course, now that I'm a parent--now that I have just the slightest idea of what it's like to be a mother--I get it. While we were busy watching Han Solo get frozen in carbonite for the 80th time, Mom was busy, y'know, TCB. Motherhood, like rust, never sleeps. Never watches Return of the Jedi, either.

Not that she wasn't familiar with the material. She used to let me stay up late to listen to the Radio Dramatization of Empire on CBC. She helped me learn to read with the Star Wars storybooks and novelizations. She abided my ambition to become a Jedi Knight, tolerated my Lego tornadoes and dutifully reminded me when I had left my action figures in the freezer again.

These days, I've got a baby of my own. I'm a pretty good father, in my opinion. I'm getting better at it all the time. I like to think that if I had to, I could take the world on my back for my little girl. But my wife, the beautiful mother of my beautiful little girl, she's there carrying the weight every single day. I don't want to undersell the importance or hard work of fathering here, but mothers, man, I don't know how they do it. I do know, though, that I couldn't do it without 'em. And I certainly wouldn't even want to try.

This is all an inadequate show of appreciation for both my own mother and the mother of my baby, and all the sacrifice, hard work, and love they commit every single day.

mp3: "Be Careful There's A Baby In The House" by Loudon Wainwright III