When you become a parent, you learn to start your voicemails with a clear declaration of urgency.

It’s a simple shorthand. Either, “Hey, not an emergency, but call me when you have a moment,” or some version of, “Holyheck,crisis,callmeassoonasyoucan.”

You’ll have to excuse Kelly Meek for not knowing the code back in 2013 when she left her wife, Erin, a message saying the state had finally called with a placement, a newborn who needed a foster home.

“It’s not an emergency,” Erin, 29, lovingly mimics in a high voice meant to be Kelly. “But the agency called and there’s a baby that needs a home, and I said, ‘yes.’”

“What?” Kelly says, pushing back with a sly smile. “I had it handled.”

Kelly, 41, may not have known the parental code then, but she’s grown intimately familiar during the Meek's circuitous child-rearing journey.

Since becoming licensed foster care providers seven years ago, the Meeks have adopted three kids — now 6, 15 and 17 — and fostered more than 20 children. Ten were babies delivered by placement workers to the Meeks' door, and five were just days old when the couple picked them up from the hospital.

Along the way, they’ve housed a handful of four-legged children and guided countless offspring of friends and family.

To put it more directly, when the Meeks mom, they mom hard.

“We have friends who joke that we have babies more often than people who actually birth babies,” Erin said.

“Very true,” Kelly replied, “because we don’t have to grow them.”

So it seems Mother’s Day — a time set aside to celebrate moms with handmade cards and breakfast in bed — would be a holiday made for the Meeks. But in our modern world where family lineages look less like a tree and more like a bush, Mother’s Day can be complicated.

Setting aside that the Meeks are a same-sex couple, most of the kids they mother aren’t in their house for long. They’re a way station on someone else's journey to motherhood, and that’s absolutely fine with them — but then this pesky day in May pops up.

“Mother's Day can be hard for me because almost all of the time I feel like I am mothering, like I am parenting, I am in it all the time,” she said. “But then the way that Mother's Day shows up in places doesn't connect with me.”

It hits like a tsunami in birth stories and breastfeeding complaints and mommy-and-me class meetups and meal train spreadsheets and baby showers. Erin pauses to point out that though the Meeks have parented 10 babies, they've never had a baby shower.

Understand that the Meeks aren’t complaining. They’re merely pointing out that Mother’s Day paints a sameness on unique stories, and they get me thinking that maybe we need a redefining of Mother’s Day. That maybe it shouldn’t focus on June Cleaver-like status in a home, but instead be a day defined by love and mentorship – in all its forms.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I have to tell you about a baby named Griffin.

A voice with an offer

Kelly was at a conference for work when her phone rang.

“Can you take a newborn?” Kelly remembers the voice on the other end saying. “We’re trying to discharge him from the hospital, like, now.”

After a year of hosting “respite” foster children — where the Meeks acted as foster homes when permanent foster families needed to leave the state or get away overnight — this was the call she had been waiting for, to be sure, but there was no time to process the request. The voice wanted an answer — now.

“Yes,” Kelly said, knowing that if she had any trepidation, the caseworker would move down the list.

By the time Erin called her back that afternoon, Kelly had secured Family and Medical Leave for a few weeks and bribed a friend with baby snuggles in exchange for watching Griffin the few hours she and Erin had prior engagements.

The pair planned to pick him up after work, giving Erin enough time to drop by the book store for a few titles on what to expect when you are expecting.

“It just made me feel better about the fact that, OK, we are getting this newborn,” she said with a chuckle.

Baby carrier in hand, a protective group of nurses met them, obviously sizing the pair up. One handed over diapers and formula and gave them a briefing on Griffin.

“After she kind of looked at us for a minute, she smiled and said, ‘You want to hold him?’” Erin remembered.

She got up and walked over to the nurse before being stopped with a terse, “Wash your hands first.” It was her inaugural “parenting fail,” she laughs now.

Their five-minute trip home rounded up to 20 as they took taking turns with care and stopped extra long at every sign. The first night, Kelly snuggled a bundled Griffin with one hand and read through grant proposals for her day job at the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault with the other.

There, on that couch, everything they had been through — the classes, the licenses, the interviews — was made real.

This fragile life was under their supervision and it was an awesome responsibility — for however brief he would be with them.

But first, puppies

A few years earlier, a different kind of baby was responsible for bringing Erin and Kelly together – puppies.

“She was my dog sitter,” Kelly said with a laugh.

In the summer of 2010, Erin, then a Drake student who had been taking care of Kelly’s three dogs, needed a place to stay. Kelly offered her house, suggesting it’d be easier for the dogs if Erin was already there during Kelly's busy summer of travel. In the hot Iowa air, a friendship evolved into more than a friendship, and Erin basically never left.

“Things felt better when she was around,” Kelly said. “And the dogs liked her; dogs are a good judge of character.”

With a 12-year age difference, Kelly was hesitant to tell Erin she wanted to be a parent right after they cemented their relationship. Kelly had already grappled with her emotions about not experiencing pregnancy, which in her mid-30s wasn’t going to be in the cards.

Through her work, she'd seen a lot of kids move through the foster care system. She intimately knew there were kids who needed a place, and she desperately wanted her home to be one of those spaces.

She soon discovered Erin also saw herself as a mom. Erin's Texan mother reminds her often that when people asked little Erin what she wanted to be when she grew up, she listed off a million things, but “mommy” was always first.

Still, Erin was 22 and needed a slow start, so they became respite-only providers.

“I wanted to get our feet wet, you know, figure out what worked for us and what didn't work for us,” she said.

As respite-only providers, the Meeks molded their lives to maintain kids’ routines while they stayed at their home. If the couple normally ate at 7 p.m., but their placement ate at 4 p.m., the family set the table at 3:45 p.m. If the child went to taekwondo on the other side of town, one of them got off work to beat the traffic on I-235.

After a year of that, they started to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to bring kids into their routine and if it wouldn’t be more fulfilling to take kids on adventures with them.

“I realized that I’m sad when the kids go,” Kelly said. “I’m ready for the kids to be here all the time.”

So they readied their home for full-time placement, which is where they were going to stop. Adoption was something they were licensed for, sure (it’s recommended by most state workers to be dually licensed), but they didn't have any intention of using that part for a while.

“But,” Kelly sighed, “things change.”'

Bow-ties and guilt

As the Meeks were mastering diaper changing and bottle feeding, the situation with Griffin’s birth mom quickly changed.

The state does everything they can to place children back with their mother or within their extended family, experts said. But at the same time, they start “concurrent planning” or preparing foster families if mothers’ parental rights are terminated.

As part of signing up to be a foster parent, Kelly reconciled the impermanence she would have in kids lives. The Meeks take seriously their role as co-parents while birth parents got themselves straight.

They trade photos and stories with birth parents over text. They host additional visits, allow moms to do their children’s hair once a week or families to help with bath time.

Other kids they'd housed were thriving back at home by the time the state determined Griffin wasn’t going to be safe with his birth mom. A caseworker called: Did they want to adopt Griffin?

It’s not that Kelly didn’t want a child, she did. But questions nagged at her; had she failed his birth mom in some way?

“By the time somebody gets their kids removed, so many systems have failed at so many different points,” Kelly said. “And so for me, it was very much, yes, very happy that we have him. I love him to bits and pieces. I can't imagine my world without him. And I can also clearly see all the mistakes that were made to get his mom or any mom or parent in that situation.”

“That's just a hard thing to hold,” she added. “I carried some guilt around that and I still carry that guilt.”

But they switched gears, re-threading their lives together with permanence in mind.

After securing an attorney, the Meeks headed to the courthouse that fall to adopt Griffin, then 19 months old.

“He had a mullet,” Kelly said, remembering her favorite part of his adoption day. She liked his blond locks long, but, in hindsight, they were too long.

“I was just afraid he was going to eat the crayons he was using to color,” Erin said, “and they were going to be like, clearly these people are not fit to be parents, they are letting their kid eat crayons.”

The judge asked them if they wanted to put anything on the record, but neither knew what to say. The judge noted that Griffin was wearing a bow-tie, matching his mom Erin’s, and that “he was the spiffiest toddler he’d ever had in his courtroom.”

As her bouncy six-year-old walks in the door from after-care, Kelly and Erin are beyond happy he is their son — their little Gryffindor, as the super Harry Potter fans call him — but they never let themselves forget that they are caring for a child somebody else birthed.

What is a mother?

The outline of a tree crafted out of white string crawls up the center wall of the Meek's house. Its leaves are photos of children who passed through their doors. Pointing at each, their names, favorite foods and pet peeves come to Kelly easily. They all left a deep mark on her, and she hopes she affected them, too.

It’s in front of these familial branches that we get to the root of the issue with Mother’s Day.

Neither Erin nor Kelly have birthed a child, but could anyone deny that they are mothers at least 20 times over?

A friend told me that Mother’s Day might be the “most egalitarian holiday there is," writing "the one thing we have in common is mothers."

A sentiment fit for a Hallmark card, but one that's only true if you change how you define "mother." If you separate the title from birth and use it to characterize anyone who guides, nurtures, believes in and even calls you out in those moments you need it.

My mother is a grounding force in my life, teaching me to give without receiving, to enjoy a glass of white wine at the end of the day and to laugh when you want to cry (still working on that one).

But I have had lots of other mothers: My babysitter, Andrea Miller, who treated me like an adult when everyone else saw me as a child; my sister, who delivers much needed reality checks with an empathetic hand; and even the editors, Rick Kogan and Mike Trautmann, who believed in me more than I ever believed in myself.

Mothers are the step-parents, the single dads, the aunts, the cat parents, the mentors, the rainbow parents of children who didn’t breathe our air, the good colleagues, the woman in the elevator who asks you how you're doing every day, and, yes, the matriarchs in Norman Rockwell-like families, too.

So this Mother’s Day, don’t flail about trying to get the last bouquet at Hy-Vee. Instead, call all the mothers in your life and share a moment they made an impact on you. Then spend some time thinking about the ways you are a mother to those around you. Make a plan to be more motherly.

As another person told me it’s all "perspective," and that’s true. But as members of the greater human community, we can do something about how we talk about mothers, mothering and being a mom. Namely, treat it like religion, politics and your thoughts on the Mueller report — don’t assume that everyone feels the way you do, had it just like you did or, frankly, cares at all.

In January, the Meeks adopted two more kids — Leo, 15, and Selena, 17 — and the judge again asked them if they wanted to put something on the record. This time they did.

“I wanted to make sure to say that we think of this as an opportunity to add to our family, rather than replacing somebody in another family,” Erin said.

That’s the great thing about love and mothers, there’s a never-ending supply.

COURTNEY CROWDER, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. She just got married, so stop asking about kids, OK! You can reach her at (515) 284-8360 or ccrowder@dmreg.com. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.