This Mother's Day season opened my eyes to something I never really paid attention to before. It had nothing to do with crowded restaurants, picked over pastries at the grocery store, or the piles of advertisments claiming to be the perfect Mother's day gift. This really had nothing to do with the day to speak of. I noticed something interesting about myself.
I suck at personalizing greeting cards.
For whatever reason, I have always thought it necessary to add my own little message at the bottom of a card. Not because I don't think the good people at American Greetings do an adequate job capturing the moment on embossed cardboard, but because I want to make the card, you know, even more special.
So, armed with a pen and a fairly strong grasp of the english language, I prepared to add special messages for my mother and my wifes cards. Time passed, first just a few minutes, then hours. I just couldn't think of anything to say that the card didn't already cover. Everyone knows that if you plagerize a saying from the same card you are giving, you are in a whole new category of unorginal. For fear of being unoriginal, I kept at it.
More time passed. To make things worse, I was trying to fill out this card while Rhonda (my wife) was still in the house. So, when I heard her coming by, I would quickly hide the card. Two times I snuck into the bathroom, locked the door, and pretended to do my business. (Note: Nothing adds fuel to the fire of incompetency than pretending to take a dump while trying to write something sincere in a card.) After two go arounds with this, I realized that sitting on the toilet and using the sink as my desk was not the environment for crafting a beautiful message to the mother of my children.
I finally put pen to paper. After hours of struggling with writer's block and easing my wife's mind (who thought I had diarrhea), I hammered out this personalized message in her Mother's Day card.
"Have a great day!"
Swish!