What I Want for Mother’s Day

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Passion to the Third Degree.

What I want for Mother’s Day this year is…well, not necessarily for Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is the next “holiday” for gift-getting, and why do I think I need a holiday for this?

I want a honey-to-do. Well, that didn’t sound quite right either. Okay, true, but…blush…. I’ll start over.

I’ve never been a wife or girlfriend who kept a honey-do list. Unless it was impossible physically—and there were some times when I was injured or pregnant that certain heavy lifting of things was impossible—I did my own honey-do’s.

I’m thinking seriously of hiring a handy-husband-for-a-day to come in and take care of various small things around the house. Replace a light bulb that I’d have to get on a 12-foot ladder to reach. Climb on the roof and rake off the pine straw. Set up the screw-in organizers in the bottom of the kitchen cabinets or replace the toilet paper roller apparatus in the girls’ bathroom. Help put up the border in the bedroom. Fix the weights on my home gym. Climb the little oak outside my home office window and saw off that low limb. Just little things.

When my floor and hurricane repair guy was here last fall, he voluntarily replaced some door hinges and various little things that would take my time. I probably got downright teary-eyed with appreciation. Ditto Preston tuning my guitar—he’s a great kid, with a great talent and a great voice, like many of Shannon’s friends and I always enjoy hearing him play.

It’s not that I can’t do any of these things myself and I normally do, when I have time and that’s how I want to spend my free time or they just can’t wait any longer, but the concept of a honey-do list—and someone who would voluntarily help me with such things—is one that’s still foreign to me.

And I’d like it not to be.