This weekend is Mother’s Day, the most glorious of all holidays. You know, the day when you get to sleep in, your kids give you gifts signifying their appreciation for all your hard work and sacrifices, you get to shower in peace and everyone is well behaved all day? Yeah, right.

Mother’s Day is a farce.

Those commercials with the sunny children in crisp white freshly pressed linen pants and clean, wrinkle free shirts bestowing gifts of jewelry and flowers upon their smiling, cheerful mother as she reads their homemade cards over an amazingly edible breakfast in bed? Yeah, they’re crap. This will be my twelfth Mother’s Day and not one single one has gone that way. In fact, not one single one has even been a nice day.

I guess it’s partly my fault, you know, for placing my expectations so high.

Each year I wake up with the crazy idea that maybe they’ve finally got it. I don’t really don’t want the homemade crafts that fall apart or breakfast in bed. I don’t want expensive jewelry or flowers. What I really truly want for Mother’s Day is to be left alone.

What?!?!?

Yup, you got it. I don’t want to spend the day in the park watching my little darlings frolic in the sun. I don’t want them to cook me a meal or even make me cards full of glue and glitter on Saturday night at 9:00 when they realize they forgot to buy a card.

I have been requesting for about five years running that my husband take the kids somewhere for eight or nine hours so I could finally clean up their messes without them creating new messes in the process.

Someone told me trying to clean while your children are growing is like shoveling snow while its still snowing. They ain’t kidding. It’s also like trying to remove the dead bugs off your windshield while driving down the Parkway at 75 miles an hour or like giving the dog a bath in the rain. Same concept.

It’s just dumb and you would think I would learn by now, but I have some obsession about having a house with windows without paw prints and slobber, refrigerator doors without fingerprints, and floors that you don’t stick to. I’d also really like to see my daughter’s bedroom floor at some point before she leaves for college.

That would be a good gift.

Please clean your room. And not “shove everything in the drawers and under the bed” kind of clean. Real clean, organized rooms where everything has a place and actually stays in that place for more than a day.

Speaking of room cleaning…

At least once a year I trick myself into thinking that I am truly going to succeed in getting the kids’ rooms organized. I spend hours in their rooms, iPod headphones in my ears, garbage bag in my hand. This sudden overwhelming need to clean usually comes after Christmas or their birthdays when I realize there just isn’t enough room for all their crap and we need to get rid of some stuff NOW. It usually starts off with me insisting that the resident of the bedroom “help” me and then progresses to me kicking their whiny butt out and muttering under my breath. If my husband would just take them out on Mother’s Day, I could just skip directly to the muttering under my breath phase.

Ahhh, to dream….

My Mother’s Day most likely will go more like this. I will wake up at 5:45 in the morning with the dog nudging me with his wet, slobbery face to feed him and let him out. I will gently murmur to my husband that it’s Mother’s Day, and would he please deal with the dog that he wanted, for once. He will blissful ignore me and snore louder thus to signify he REALLY is sleeping.

I will proceed to kick him in the leg which he will also fail to acknowledge. The dog will start growling under his breath which will progress into an annoying bark as I shove my husband to no avail. Grumbling, I will drag myself out of bed and fulfill the dog’s canine needs. He will then jump in my spot in the bed and lay his head on my pillow when I stumble into the bathroom to pee.

After shoving him out of the way, I will discover at least one child in my bed. Then, the second child will appear and they will start arguing over who gets to “sleep next to mommy”. After listening to the bickering and hugging the side of the bed for fifteen minutes, I will resign myself to the fact that I am not getting back to sleep and I’ll get up.

Might as well start my day, right?

I will then go downstairs, pour myself a bowl of cereal, shower, get dressed, do laundry, run the dishwasher, vacuum, fix a roof, mow the lawn, and basically grow old before anyone else in the house gets up. Okay, gross exaggeration, but you know what I mean. Then, they will trickle out of bed; my husband being the last one up.

He will pout when he finds out I already had breakfast and we aren’t going out to eat. I will point out that it is 10:00 and I have been up for 3 hours and I was hungry. The hubby will storm off to his office or man cave where he will stay for at least another few hours. I will continue the household chores which no one will offer to assist me with.

In fact, nobody will even acknowledge my existence unless I try to go to the bathroom. Then, the kids and the dog will all be outside the bathroom door in crisis mode.

Eventually, the kids will realize its Mother’s Day, most likely from some show on TV where there are Mother’s Day antics taking place in a humorous fashion, and they will go outside to pick me dandelions which I am highly allergic to. I will thank them through tearful eyes and a runny nose and then proceed to discretely throw the dandelions in the garbage.

At some point in time later, my daughter will discover the dandelions in the garbage, start crying that I hate her gift and throw herself on the ground in a melodramatic fashion.

After ten minutes of her tantrum, the older one will inevitably call her a moron and tell her to shut up. He may even kick her or pinch her, too. Depends on his tolerance level that day. Which will make her cry even more. In no time they will be screaming at each other and punches will be thrown.

The dogs will be barking, especially the little dog who is convinced that she has given birth to them. After ignoring the melee until there is blood shed, I will yell and punish everyone, sending them to their rooms, resulting in more crying and each child loudly protesting and explaining why it’s not their fault.

At this point, I will storm up to my husband and tell him I am going out shopping. He will look up from whatever ridiculous redneck reality show he is watching, gaze at me and say, in all seriousness, “don’t you want to be with me and the kids on Mother’s Day?”

And that, my friends, is why Mother’s Day sucks.

It’s supposed to be “our day” yet, nobody really tries to make it nice for us. If they could just follow simple instructions, there would be no tears, no beatings, just happy mommies.