Margaritaville

by amy famb
(alamogordo, nm, usa)

Two or three years ago myself, my husband, my sister, and a few of our very good friends wanted to do something special for my mom on mother's day. My mom has never been the 'typical' mom. Growing up she loved hanging out with us and all of our friends, would make huge dinners so they all could stay over to eat, didn't mind sleep-overs every weekend, and knew how to have as much fun as we did. In fact, she was such a cool mom that all of our friends would call her 'mom' instead of by her name. For mother's day we just knew we had to do something special for her to let her know how greatly she was appreciated by all of us.

My mom works as a teacher and left the house at about seven in the morning to get to work. We all had previously made up excuses and told her we could not meet with her on mother's day but would see her the following weekend. She was obviously sad about this situation. We all meet at her house at about eight that morning and immediately got to work. Everyone worked as fast as possible, helped each other out with various projects, and skipped lunch to make sure the job got done. Throughout the day my mom called each of us in turn to see if our plans had changed and we would be able to meet her for dinner after all. We all stuck to our fake excuses and continued to work that much harder to make sure our gift would make up for temporarily disappointing my mom.

Finally, at five the evening my mom's car pulled into the driveway. We all stayed hidden in the living room until she flipped on the lights and we yelled, 'happy mother's day'! She was totally shocked and beyond happy to see everyone there to visit her. She thought that was the end of her mother's day and was more than pleased, but then we told her to follow us outside to her backyard where she has a swimming pool. Once outside she took one look at our project and began to cry, laugh, smile, and look shocked all at once.

All day we had worked to build my mom a pool-side bar. The 'shack' was complete with electricity, fridge, freezer, stocked up with alcoholic beverages, and decorated. We even put up a sign that read 'margaritaville' which was fitting considering her name was Margarita and she was a fan of Jimmy Buffet. Instead of going out to a fancy dinner that night, we ordered lots of pizza, put on our swim suits and opened her bar up for service.