Stacy's Mom

Listen while you read: (It's Mother's Day)

Stacy's mom has got it goin' on

Stacy, can I come over after school?
We can hang around by the pool
Did your mom get back from her business trip?
Is she there, or is she trying to give me the slip?

You know, I'm not the little boy that I used to be
I'm all grown up now, baby, can't you see?

Stacy's mom has got it goin' on
She's all I want, and I've waited for so long
Stacy, can't you see you're just not the girl for me
I know it might be wrong, but I'm in love with Stacy's mom

Stacy's mom has got it goin' on . . . 

~  Fountains of Wayne

I certainly don't mean to be snarky, but here's my offering for Mother's Day 2017. I mean, it's a song with a Mom in it, right? Fountains of Wayne released "Stacy's Mom" on Welcome Interstate Managers in 2003. Seriously, the song is fourteen years old already? I remember buying the CD when it was released. I was not even a year into widowhood, and I was mourning the fact that my late husband had died before Fountains of Wayne had a big hit. Pete grew up in Wayne, after all. The band's name comes from an oddly revered garden center on Rt. 23 in Wayne, a sort of kitschy landmark that anyone driving to or from NYC would recognize as something that existed between suburbia and the "vast wilderness of rednecks and retired hippies" that is my home in New Jersey.

I also remember ironing in my bedroom one afternoon, blasting out the song and singing along. I was not aware that a couple of my kids and their friends were in the next room. It was one of those moments when their teenage brains could not discern between pride and horror that their own mother would be rocking out to such a song. "Mom, do you know what this song is about?" one of them asked. Duh.

And that scene, above, is what motherhood is about. Those sad, sweet, silly, stressful, and sentimental moments that get stored in your head to be retrieved fourteen years later when you're wishing that we didn't have these artificial "holidays" to endure. One day out of 365 to be good to your mother? What's wrong with this picture?

While I will be saying so long to one of my children on Mother's Day morning as I leave her home in North Carolina to continue my journey north, my other two offspring live too far away to see. It is what it is, just another day. I will spend this Mother's Day driving, rocking out to the tunes, getting closer and closer to my northern home in a state I share with Fountains of Wayne.

Putting my snarkiness aside, I hope your day is a good one, whether or not you are a mother, have a mother, or want to one day be a mother.