Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 10, the day when we celebrate our mothers, grandmothers, wives and daughters with brunches or breakfasts, flowers or just a phone call for those of us who live too far away to travel. The day also offers those who have lost their mother a chance to reflect on her influence on their lives.

As kids, we align with our parents in different ways. One parent becomes the primary disciplinarian, the other the primary comfort. One is the parent to whom we bring our bad news first, or the first we ask for advice, or the one whose hand we hold when our parents separate to pick up things in different aisles in the grocery store. Neither is a “favorite,” per se, as we love them both, but we develop different feelings for each parent.

It’s a generalization, but our mothers tend to be, by and large, our source of comfort, fathers our source of protection. Every family is different, obviously, but this largely holds true in our household.

My wife is endlessly caring, always playful and wholly fixated on providing comfort and care to our three little ones, even when two of them are fighting over a toy, which place to sit at the dinner table, what video to watch on YouTube when they get some screen time. Even when they’re being little monsters, tearing up the house with Matchbox cars, Lego bricks and stuffed animals, their silly antics and humor make being a parent worth enduring the occasional tantrum over something ultimately insignificant.

Through moments good and bad, my wife is their gentle and kind overseer, peacemaker, guardian, playmate and friend. She takes them to the library and city parks in Sedona and the Verde Valley when I’m here at the newsroom writing for you. We do go on family “adventures” on the weekends running errands or enjoying what the Verde Valley has to offer young kids and working families — which despite what resident may think, based on social media — is quite a lot.

My wife, their mother, can turn a trip to the hardware store or doctor’s office into an experience full of fun and learning. My wife creates art projects for them to complete, turns boxes into castles, hampers into a race cars, couch cushions into forts which imagination and dedication to provide them with childhoods full of creativity, curiosity and magic.

I’m just the math, text and science about the way things work, while she is the avenue for the exploration, discovery and experience of how they work and how they feel.

Our children are half-her, half-me but they know their mother better and deeper because she is their confidant and comfort. She knew them earlier than I did as they kicked and turned inside her. All of us are here because a mother carried us and showed us the world thereafter.

Summer break is just a few weeks away and all three will be at home, but our twins Odysseus Luke and Artemis Leia will start preschool next year, joining their older sister Athena Zelda at West Sedona School, so this time of endless play will be cut in half with the intermission of a school day, but it has built a foundation with how they will see the world, the people and places in it and what they can create in those new spaces with the imaginations.

My own mother has changed from a stern but caring parental figure into a friend and travel buddy. She visits Sedona often to see me and my wife, but more so these three little ones who carry her artistic talents in their genes — seeing what new creations they’ve made since her last visit.

We all have our unique stories about our family dynamics, our parents and siblings. The irony of the human experience is that every family is the same and every family is irreplaceably and unrepeatably unique.

You can read this newspaper, hike the red rocks, count stars in the Milky Way, see hopeful possibility in two lanes of empty blacktop, kiss a lover, send poems to friends, write a political protest sign and read storybooks to children because one mother shared her heartbeat with you and held you in her arms after you emerged, naked and alone, in an utterly foreign world.

Say “thank you” to your mother — and all the mothers you know — for this endless, selfless gift.