A Week for Mothers

Mother's Day in Hoi An

Last week began with Mothers Day for me, for international friends and for Vietnamese moms.   I got my celebration in the morning, and then I celebrated with the kids all day long - doing what mothers do best...carting them around to play dates and birthday parties.

We enjoyed an afternoon in Danang with our school friends at the home of Eloise and Theo.  It was duly noted that they have a Cracker Jack air conditioner that made their living room feel like the North Pole.  We will be bunking there the next time we have a power outage in Hoi An (or the next time we neglect to pay our power bill when the temperature is hovering near 100 degrees...lights out baby!).  The fact that they had a cool pool in their backyard and warm muffins in the kitchen only added to our love affair with the place.

Next up (after driving in circles in the suburbs of Danang) was a birthday party for our friend Anna Mei (of the "family with five girls in Danang" as they are known in the community).  When you have five girls, you know how to throw a party and manage the masses.  This was an "art studio" party with dozens of kids moving from station to station whenever a whistle blew.  There were "make your own" cakes in the kitchen with strict rules about "no eating" until the appointed hour (which didn't keep me from scarfing down as many of the candy decorations as I could get away with or sending Foster into the kitchen time after time to steal more Skittles for me).  The structure and organization of this well-oiled birthday machine was impressive.  It almost made me want to throw a party (for about two seconds).

       

For the entire afternoon we could easily imagine that we were back in Vermont. Yes, there were some Vietnamese children in the birthday party mix and a few different languages floating in the air, but it felt like any other busy weekend day at home - play dates and parties, crafts and treats.  Then we stepped back into the broiling sunshine at 5:00 p.m. to begin our motorbike ride back to Hoi An.  The birthday girl thanked us for coming and warned us not to run over the enormous, fly-infested, dead rat sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the house.  Back to reality. Vietnam...where little girls don't flinch over warm, rotting rodents.

Three days later came Coconut's turn for Mother's Day.  I personally prefer the type with gifts and flowers and no laboring, pushing and screaming.  Coconut got the latter, but she spared us the details and went off into the rice paddy to deliver her bundle of joy.  I felt a little badly that she was alone on this momentous occasion.  Then my practical side kicked in, and I was grateful that I didn't have to clean up the mess.  Although we were initially concerned that Coconut seemed to lack any nurturing skills whatsoever (beginning with the fact that she delivered a puppy in the rice paddy and promptly pranced away to play with her neighborhood friends while leaving the baby behind).  She seemed intently interested in licking the puppy to death but not in nursing it or responding to its whimpers.  Perhaps she really isn't that different from many human mothers when confronted with that first alien baby. She was having her "OMG what have I done?" moment.  Fortunately she seems to have gotten over her distaste for her progeny and is mothering up a storm - nestled in the empty fish pond in our kitchen.  The plastic cranes, standing in a field of white stones, keep a watchful eye on the improvised puppy nursery where just a few short months ago our first round of fish went belly up.  Only in Vietnam...

Happy Mother's Week!