My family never really celebrated Mother's Day when I was growing up. That completely un-American failing surprises me now, but didn't faze me at the time.

According to dad, who orchestrated the boycott, there are plenty of good reasons to say "No" to Mother's Day: It's crass and commercialized, plugged by businesses trying to cash in on our collective guilt. It's a fake holiday, no day off work, not sanctioned by religion. Children should honor their mothers all the time, not just once every 365 days.

Besides, Mother's Day always fell a week or so before my mom's birthday, which we did celebrate. And we skipped Father's Day too — for all the same reasons.

Apparently, behind his facade of beloved dentist, my dad was just a rabble-rousing libertarian, determined that no outside forces tell him what to do. We four kids always knew that despite his no-celebrations policy, he loved my mother fiercely. If the family were stuck in a lifeboat, he would toss us out in a minute to save her.

Now a mom myself for 19 years, I think Mother's Day should last a full month and include daily foot and back massages. Funny how your perspective can change.

Of course I had no idea how much my mother did for me, how many sacrifices she made, until I became a mother myself. The mind cannot take in a task so vast as helping a child reach 18; it has to break it down into tiny, digestible bites.

So we move from milestone to milestone, from potty training to the ABCs, from the first soccer goal to the first SAT test. Hundreds and hundreds of tasks mastered, each one leaving an indelible pang in a mother's heart.

The kids themselves are so focused on the future, the next big challenge, they can't see us watching from the car after they have slammed the door, or peering out the window as they venture off on their first date. They can't feel the march of time that resonates in our bones, in the gray that invades our hair. They don't understand why we drag out the baby pictures for their prom dates to see, or talk about their third grade friends like it was yesterday.

It was yesterday, to us.

Looking forward, looking back, I think about myself, as a mother and a daughter, and wonder how I have measured up.

On the "good daughter" scale, I gave my mother her first grandchild, young enough so the two of them could have decades together, baking cookies and shopping, gleefully ignoring bedtimes and other rules of daily life I had imposed.

On the "bad daughter" side, I lived 350 miles away. It pained my mother to watch neighbors who got to see every play, every concert, every game their grandchildren had, and to realize she would not.

Working in the news business, I did not honor the holidays as much as I should have. It was too hard to fight to get Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July off, easier to collect the time-and-a-half holiday pay and put it toward some other vacation. Now I can't give those missed family times back to her.

Elsewhere in the family, my mother-in-law died recently and the tsunami of grief that has walloped my husband is shocking to see. I fear that the path he treads waits for all of us.

He and his mom battled for years when he was in his 20s — over girlfriends and other control issues — and even had some tiffs in his 30s. But in the last decade, they had become close confidants, talking several times a week, especially as he faced his own family struggles, including a long custody battle. Her support and advice — "Let it go!" "This too shall pass" — buoyed him like nothing else.

Whenever our three college kids act up (getting kicked out of the dorm for partying, ignoring parking tickets until a license is suspended), I remind my husband that he did not even invite his mother to his first wedding.

Ouch, that's a bull's-eye — but at least it gives us hope. Even if I want to strangle the kids now, there's a chance we can become closer in 10 years or so.

I worked for nine years on The Associated Press' foreign desk, and the most enduring image I had of the first Iraq war was Kurdish mothers carrying their 3-year-olds on their backs, fleeing over the mountains to Turkey to escape Saddam Hussein's forces. At the time, I could barely carry my 3-year-old four blocks.

Now, I'm staggering with the load of paying for three college educations. I speak for every mother in America — nay, every parent — when I say that college tuitions are sucking the marrow from my bones and no one in government is really doing anything about it.

But that's just part of being a mother, now isn't it? Tossing and turning at night, trying to figure out another way to kite checks so the mortgage and the tuition don't bounce.

Amid all this, you would like to think your children are bursting with appreciation. Nah, they are still too young. Did I think it was any big deal when my mom went back to law school with four kids under 12? I think I whined about having to babysit more.

So as you struggle to avoid the poorhouse, these over-18-but-not-yet-adults do stupid things like breaking your heart with casual lies, trying to hide this or that from you. They don't understand that the lies themselves are what rip you apart.

On this Mother's Day, I wish my daughter was kinder to me. I wish I was a better daughter to my own mother.

It's five months past New Year's but as good a time as any for a new resolution: Appreciate your mother more — only she and God know how much she did to raise you.