Mother's Day in Costa Rica

Well I hope everybody had a great weekend, mine was a bit too busy to actually have time to sit down and enjoy it, but I'm looking down the barrel of this next workday with a little bit more confidence. This week is gonna be a little bit more active than most because I felt the itch to get some writing done finally. Kudos all you fellow bloggers who manage to do this seven days a week, 365 days a year, I don't think most readers realize how exhausting it can be to come up with something original to write about every single day. My hat is definitely off to you!

Today is Mother's Day in Costa Rica, and my fiancée Paty ( a.k.a. Dr. Girlfriend) gets to celebrate her second one of the year. One drawback of being the alpha male in a multicultural household is that the incorporation of two different cultures' holidays means you better keep one eye on the calendar at all times lest you get the dreaded "how could you forget?!" conversation no man ever wants to have. And it also sucks that they don't have Halloween down here, and I really wish the gringo population here would get together and market it a little better. After all we do celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the United States, why not Halloween in Costa Rica? But I digress...

They celebrated a little differently down here in that Mother's Day is actually a national holiday that everybody gets off from work. It's a day when you see entire families in the parks and plazas just walking around together, enjoying the weather while greeting friends. I couldn't help but fall in love with the way, Tico culture puts family in such an important place in their national identity, from the time I first started walking around and exploring down here. Whenever you see a family in the park, it's almost always the entire family right up to the most elderly in their wheelchairs.

The way we treat our old people in the United States is abhorrent, bordering upon a human rights violation in my opinion. If you don't believe me, take a day trip to a nursing home. So one of the things that I love about this place is the fact that the elderly have the right to die at home surrounded by family, and aren't left in institutionalized human dustbins once they become a "burden". I am actually comforted by the notion that if I am unfortunate enough to live past my bladder's shelf life, I will most likely be in one of my children's houses, playing video games and trying to stay as intoxicated as possible.

And the mother of my children (80% of them anyway) is who I have to thank for this. She gave me four gifts that I will always be grateful for in the form of our ridiculously gorgeous kids, and the way she has kept her beautiful heart the same the entire five years she and I have been together. This is a person who gets up at 4:30 AM every day, wakes and bathes and dresses four human beings, then walks with all of them to the local bakery because she likes that the kids eat their bread and tortillas just as they come out of the oven. She then comes back, feeds all four aforementioned humans, cleans up after them, and then wakes up her man with a kiss as he mutters and swears all the way to the shower. Mind you I'm not swearing or muttering at her, it's actually the impending work day that I am voicing my hostility towards. At least she finds it funny...

Throughout the day, she reads, plays, entertains, spends all of her time with the kids. She never takes a break. She never busts into my office demanding help. And she actually comes in and rubs MY shoulders when my own work day is getting a bit stressful. There is no possible way that I can ever be more grateful for a woman in my life than this one. And I am also thankful that I was given the foresight and the experience to truly appreciate her as much as she deserves to be appreciated. I will treat her like a queen until my last breath in this world. I try my absolute best to give her rest whenever she needs it as well as to help with the four very active kids in our lives. Time alone is definitely at a premium, but every once in a while circumstance or necessity permits us to take a little trip together into San Jose without the kids, and we always make sure to enjoy to the fullest. This is probably for the best, because our Pisces/Scorpio natures and her Catholic upbringing usually means that time spent alone we've each other can very easily result in more children. We are kind of wanting to hold off on that for the next 20 or so years until the current kids can start picking up that slack.

But I absolutely love this woman. Even though we are 13 years apart in age, I often times feel as though I've met a kindred spirit in her. She is just as curious about the natural world and just as passionate about her ideals as I am about mine. It is to her that I dedicate this blog post on my fifth Costa Rican Mother's Day, it is to her that I dedicate every single noble action I can make in this life as well.

I'm wondering if I should call and wish my own mother a happy Costa Rican Mother's Day.... Yeah I probably should. Maybe the allure of having two mothers days a year will be too much for her to resist, and she can finally move down here permanently....