Looking back at a Mother’s Day when an infant blessed our lives

You never know what the Good Lord has waiting for you just around the corner

I frequently get asked if I have a favorite column after all these years of typing for a living.

There are several, actually.

This is one of them as it appeared in The Davis Enterprise on Mother’s Day, 2002.

Every year on this day I write about my mother.

Sometimes I recycle something I said previously about my mother, Dorothy Jean Dunning, partly because I’m lazy by nature and partly because I don’t have anything to add to last year’s effort.

And while it makes sense for me to continue to write about my mother and all her wonderfulness on this most glorious of days, today I plan instead to tell you about another wonderful woman who became a mother for the first time during the last nine months.

The woman is my wife, Shelley, and on one very warm evening last July she gave birth to our daughter Maev.

Maev

Until that day, I knew Shelley in a number of ways. As the heartthrob of my life, as my best friend, as my favorite person to take for a ride in the country, and, of course, as my wife.

I had also observed her as a devoted sister, a loving daughter and a cherished aunt to numerous nieces and nephews.

But I had never seen her as a mother.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. In fact, I wasn’t surprised at all as I watched the sheer joy she experienced last summer while holding this tiny child that neither of us had known just hours before.

She knew then that her life had been irretrievably changed in so many ways. All of them for the better.

And it occurred to me as I watched her with a child less than a day old that I had never seen her like this before.

I had seen many wonderful sides of her, but not this one.

I also wondered how I could have spent nearly 50 years on this earth without even knowing this woman existed.

They say the Lord works in mysterious ways, and Shelley’s sudden and unexpected presence in my life was proof enough for me.

Maev is 9 months old now and our wonder and joy at her very normal development has continued unabated.

By all accounts, she is a happy baby, partly I suppose by sheer luck, but mostly because of the extraordinary love her mother shows her every waking moment. And the sleeping ones too.

According to medical experts who are paid well to know these things, Maev is expected to have a brother or a sister the first week of August.

Apparently, there’s something about being very pregnant when it’s 110 degrees in the shade that Shelley finds appealing.

Four days ago, Shelley and Maev left for Montana so Shelley could speak at the retirement dinner for her college president. It’s the first time the three of us have been apart for more than a day since Maev was born.

They were expected to be home at 5 o’clock this afternoon, but a surprise May snowstorm shut down the Billings airport and now we’re looking at midnight. If they get home tonight at all.

When I got the phone call telling me not to head to the airport just yet, my heart dropped into my stomach. I didn’t realize I could miss two people so much that a seven-hour delay would feel like a month.

Tomorrow, I’m sure, we’ll all be laughing and none of it will have mattered.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder.

On this Mother’s Day, I certainly agree.

Reach me at bobdunning@thewaryone.com