Mother’s Day perennially knocks me flat on my face. A tapestry of loss and gratitude, anger and self-loathing winds so tightly around my limbs that I fall helpless, like a busted branch, onto my bed and burrow under the covers from Mother’s Day eve until Mother’s day morning. Invariably, my kids find me there, worming around my pillow with fists full of colored pencil cards and tray heavy with breakfast of their own invention.

One particularly memorable Mother’s Day morning, our triplets had assembled a breakfast salad. If you’re not familiar with breakfast salad as a convention, please cling to your spot in the grateful majority. My salad consisted of scraps off the edges of every vegetable in our refrigerator including piles of butter-knife cut radish bits, uncooked beans, and some packaged tuna all floating (floating!) in about three inches of soy sauce. I ate it (some of it), and I kissed their shining, proud faces, and I celebrated the way that they so sweetly celebrated me, deeply and genuinely grateful.

I remember abbreviating the Sunday floating salad festivities because my turn had come to lead songs from the piano at our little church. I left my husband to the laughter and chaos of cleaning up, dressing up, and loading up our five small ones, and scrambled to find shoes that matched (each other if not my skirt) before heading to the sanctuary to work through a few songs. For days before, I had cultivated a prideful ingratitude that steered me away from God and His word, preferring my own plans, which usually ended in yelling and crying. As I lifted my hands to the keys that morning, I shook my bowed head, muttering an embarrassed apology prayer, suddenly consciousness of my radical unworthiness to lead anyone in a procession of praise before the King I had so blatantly betrayed, again and again. “How can I come before you?” I whispered. “Who am I to lead anyone when my life has been such a half-effort, when I’m so full of doubt and bitterness? I’ve screwed everything up. I’m the wrong girl for this job. This week, I’m just so unworthy.”

Honestly, I can count on a very few fingers the number of times I’ve heard the Father’s voice whisper a discernable message in words to my heart as an answer to prayer, but on that Mother’s Day morning, He answered my heart with a laugh and this deeply sarcastic reply: “Oh, that’s right, because last Sunday you were MUCH MORE worthy!” I lifted my eyes, caught and arrested, and I had to laugh back, suddenly struck silly with the irony that sometimes I felt clean on my own, as though I had something well-made and precious to present the Creator of the Universe. I was brought straight back to my Mother’s Day bed and my floating salad.

The kids had genuinely believed that their culinary amalgamation merited the lavish praise that I rained all over their tiny faces, genuinely thought that their gift, in itself, had value apart from my praise. They grinned broadly and proudly, not knowing that my delight with their gift sprung from my overwhelming love for them, my consuming, adoring, inalienable (if clumsy) mother love. They still talk about the amazing salad that they brought to my bed. And here I was, conscious of my inadequacy before the King, childishly unaware that, on all of the other Sunday mornings, I had proudly presented Him my very best self, my cleanest creation, which always amounted to a big, sloshing, radishy, soy-sauce soaked breakfast salad — a salad He dug into because of His grace and not because of its goodness.  This morning, as I huddle in the coffee shop typing inadequate words on my little borrowed computer, trying to share my little glimpse of the truth, I’m painfully aware that if all goes well, I’ll have a gift to bring the Father. And He will take my face in His gentle hands, and kiss my cheeks. And it will be His perfect love that will sanctify the gift and consecrate my adoring gratitude with His delight. But it has always been and will always be just my very best floating salad.