I'm "Just" A Mom.

There comes a moment - say, when you are searching the entire house for your child's lost blankie for the fourth time at 10pm on a Sunday evening - when you realize that your finer aspirations - becoming, for example a modern-day female Hemingway - have necessarily fallen by the wayside.

In that moment, you have no choice but to stop, breathe deeply, and acknowledge that, no, this is not the empowered, Ayn Rand-ian existence you had imagined for yourself; that it is quite unlikely you will rewrite the rules of history or change the geo-political landscape of your time. There is a very good chance you will never see the Sahara Desert or take tea with the Dalai Lama, and it is nearly certain that you will never walk the red carpet in an organza Chanel confection.

There's also a pretty good chance distinct possibility snowball's chance in hell that you'll ever be photographed in a bikini and mistaken for the body of Angelina Jolie.

Hey, we all have our dreams. Judgment only makes the judge a smaller person. After all, I didn't comment on your childhood dreams of being a firefighter, astronaut, or whatever.

But it is, in those moments, that I find a certain kind of clarity. There's no way to predict what the rest of my life will be like, after all, and when I think of all the great accomplishments I had planned for my life they all share one thing in common - their singularity. I always thought I would do One Great Thing with my life, something I would be noted in history for.

Instead, I find that I get 3 really great accomplishments. It may be that they won't go down in the history books; I doubt I'll be numbered among the ranks with the likes of Marie Curie or Amelia Earhardt. But their names are Jack, Tobin, and (for the moment, until we change it - as we reserve the right to do) Milo. And they are some pretty amazing things, even if nobody but their father and I ever notes it.

I started my Mother's Day in a grumpy way, which remained unimproved when I realized we were out of coffee. I slept in to a not indecent hour before waking to the screams of my children, as the two boys had suddenly discovered that brothers are, apparently, each others' natural predators. Their frazzled father was just doing his best to keep them both alive and in one piece, and so I finally stumbled down the stairs in search of breakfast which was, obviously, not going to be able to make its way up to me. And I was pouting about it.

Of course, Big Daddy quickly smoothed things over. He and Jack headed up to the kitchen to make me a lovely plate of nibbles: fresh strawberries and toast with my favorite jam (amaretto peach apricot). After the nourishment made its way into mah bell-ay, I was feeling good enough to spend the afternoon wandering the mall with my menfolk. I even bought some new lip gloss at Bath and Body Works - sparkly lip gloss that smells delightfully of cupcakes.

All in all, it was a somewhat ordinary day. Me-Me the blanket was eventually located (this morning. outside in the rain. the joys.) and I found that, for all the ambitions that will likely go unrealized in this brief life of mine, I am quite content to picture an old age where I have accomplished little that the world will note... so long as I can live those days surrounded by my children, grandchildren and - of course - my pretty spectacular husband.

Reality? It's not such a bad place to live. Sometimes it even smells like cupcakes.