Mother's Day...

...will, I think, be a somewhat postponed sort of holiday. It also happens to be Pfingsten, which is a holiday in this country. Some American friends from the Ruhrgebiet are visiting us for the weekend, and there's kind of a lot going on. (13 people and one bathroom, for example). My kids gave me candy bouquets and the teenagers at church passed out heart window hangings, and the kids did a really nice song at church, too, complete with Glockenspiel parts. Otherwise, things were a little busy, though. The cool thing is that the people staying with us speak both languages, so we didn't need to translate anything (although the accent is rather different down here). I did get asked to translate for an Argentine couple, but luckily there is a new family in the congregation where the dad is half German, half Honduran? something Central American, anyway. I didn't have to do it. I can translate between English and Spanish, between English and German, but I have strangely very little neural connections between Spanish and German. Even to answer basic questions across languages is complicated. The brain must store different languages in different parts of the brain or something. Anyway, I was glad I didn't have to do it! But it was still fun to talk to the Argentines. He's working on some kind of project between several companies in town, and his wife just got here and they'll be here until mid-summer. It was lovely to talk to people from one of my other home bases in the world!

Anyway, thinking of mothers, there are all different kinds, but my husband and I figure that between our two mothers, there is nothing known that they collectively can't come up with. So thank you to my own mother for giving me curiosity about people and places and the arts and nature, and thank you to my mother in law for raising an awesome son and for knowing about children en masse and large-scale organization, and also for being greatly supportive despite our weird, nomadic lifestyle. Sometimes I hear about difficulties people have with their mothers or mother in laws, and I don't know how I got lucky, but I did. (Plus I have to admit that part of the reason I'm married to the person I am is because one of our very first dates involved meeting his family while they were in a high-stress situation, and I realized that if his parents, even under stress, treated each other in the nice way they did, that DH was going to turn out all right. And he has.) So thank you to both of our mothers, and I hope everyone else has a nice Mother's Day, and that there is someone in your life (whether or not she is your biological mother) who has been a good influence on you.