Big Hug: New York Family’s May Issue Editor’s Note

I write this note looking ahead to Mother’s Day but thinking back on a Sunday brunch at my apartment a few weeks ago. My wife and I hosted two long-time and dear friends of hers, one a working mom living in the city, like my wife, and the other visiting from San Diego, a successful journalist who never wanted to be a mom (and never became one). Amid the feast of lox and bagels, there was lots of catching up and shared laughs, but at one point our local friend, whose son was born a day before our daughter almost 13 years ago, started crying. It was brief, surprising. There wasn’t an obvious precipitating incident, but we all understood it instinctively as a cry of stress—the stress of work, marriage, ailing parents, motherhood—all of it, swelling into tears.

As I recall it, the brunch didn’t detour all that much from the general pleasure of the reunion. She had her cathartic cry—it could have been any of us—and she really didn’t seem to need or want sustained attention. I was sitting next to her, uncertain about what to say or do, but my wife clarified the situation. “Will you hug her already?” she instructed me. I did.

Life ain’t easy, but it goes down a lot more easily when you have people in your life like my wife and our buddies from brunch, women who fill their days and their families with love and decency and laughter. And when I think about this issue, timed to Mother’s Day with our annual tribute to Moms We Love, I feel it’s best to honor all of you (98% of our readers are mothers) not with vacuous happy talk about motherhood, but with a simple wish that during your own humbling journeys as parents there is much light and love and a few good friends.

By the way, the issue is stocked with a great gift roundup, but the gifts that keep on giving are our mom profiles, a report on the habits of happy families, and our cover story on an impressive and charming mom of three, Melissa Joan Hart.

Happy Mother’s Day,

Eric Messinger, Editor

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