It was Mother’s day and the year was 2008. I waited for my children to acknowledge all the hard work that I had done to raise them. I had been a single mother since 1997.

I was at my computer in my study, probably working on my novel, when my oldest son came in to talk with me. 

He had a big smile on his face. He said, “Dad is in town and he wants to take us to dinner.”

I told him it was Mother’s day and his father did not have visitation.

He said, “Yeah, but you are here all the time and he is just here today.”

I burst into tears. Their father had left to go live in Florida so he could start working on making a nasty woman his wife number 3. He had only been in Florida for two months and this is the weekend he decides to breeze back into town?

My kids demanded to go to dinner with him and I didn’t want a fight so I let them go. 

I wondered how come they blew off the mother who had raised them and loved them to go to dinner with a father who had already abandoned them twice for other women?

The only explanation I came up with was that I was the “safe parent.” I had always been there for them through thick and through thin. They knew without a doubt that I loved them.

Their father on the other hand had left their mother to marry a woman who was an alcoholic and an anorexic. He stayed married to her for nine years. 

When that marriage ended he jumped right into another one. In fact he moved to another state for that nasty woman. 

He was anything BUT a safe parent. 

They knew I loved them. I think they doubted whether he did, so they would grab at any morsel of time with him when they could get it. 

A couple of years later this son and I had a talk and he said that he didn’t think his father could love. 

This was not something new to me. I had been married to the man for twelve years I knew he didn’t know how to love. 

It is a shame that a man who doesn’t know how to love was the reason that a mother who loved her children dearly, did not get celebrated on Mother’s day.