Happy Mother’s Day, you rockers of infants, you chasers of toddlers, you parcours carpoolers, you shouters of “Inside voices!” I wish you the best, but sorry to say, this little ode is not really for you. If you’re still the nexus around which everything revolves for your kids, this is not for you. As hard as things might be in your worlds right now, you have your reward.
This is my Happy Mother’s Day card to those of us who are in a limbo state of parenting and are no longer sure where our reward is. This is for the mothers out there who were deceived by the essential nature of the tasks listed above into somehow believing they would always be required of you. This is for the mothers who were once all those things, but whose arms are now empty, houses ghostly quiet, and minivans underused. This is for the mothers who count themselves lucky to snatch a peck on the cheek or half-hearted hug from the girl who once, on the first day of preschool, refused to be pried out of your embrace. This is for the mothers disoriented every day of the school year starting at 2:30 p.m. because that girl can now do the pick-up and drop-off rounds, and once the kids are home, even your baby, now 12, who’s obliging and sensitive, can’t really find a use for you. This is for those mothers who are now wondering if maybe there really is no more use for you, especially on those nights of the week when all of a sudden everyone turns out to be perfectly capable of procuring their own perfectly adequate dinner.
This is for the mothers who are left to wonder, “Why am I here?”
This is for the mothers out there like me. I would gladly subtract a year off the latter half of my life to replay the month when I was subjected to such sustained nagging that I relented and agreed to let my girl get a hypoallergenic kitten and then listened as that girl, she of the fat cheeks and perpetually gnarled hair, explained to the shelter staff that she needed a “hyperenergetic” kitten, or to hold for half an hour a three-year-old in my left arm and a two-year-old in my right and know that their pushing and batting and kicking had been a battle over who got to be closest to me.
This is for the mothers like me who, these days, scroll through podcast options wondering which might inspire the 16- and/or 15-year-old squirrelled away in her room upstairs to ask me a question, any question, anything at all.
Mother’s Day was invented by capitalism to sell hyperbolic cards, but it serves mainly to highlight how infrequently we are served breakfast. A mother, on the other hand, was invented by love to spend her day preparing a meal for her teenager, even though the teenager has no intention of eating it, or to push her child in a stroller through the supermarket, even though the child is 14 and will never walk or talk, or to fly across the country to sit on a dorm room floor rocking her child and telling him everything will be all right, even though the child is six-foot-three, and there’s little evidence that things will be all right. “You’re the best mom in the world!” isn’t true to life. Mother’s Day cards ought to say, “Thank you, mom, for keeping me alive, long after I stopped being cute.”
This is for my mother out there. Or, rather, my mother right here, in Great Barrington, who might read this if one of her friends calls to tell her about it. I was once a cute child, turned into a teenager who failed to notice the thousands of things you did to keep me alive, or to notice that you did all those things without ever drawing attention to the effort or time or trouble or stress or money they cost you. I would like do things differently now, Mom. I’d like to sit side-by-side with you and count up all those things and marvel at their number and compare notes. But, of course, love can’t be quantified, so here’s my card substitute. Thank you, Mom, for all the ways you kept me alive.
My mom has a Mother’s Day story from St. Patrick’s Day, in either 1967 or 1968, four years before I was born. Mom, my Aunt Kay, and my two little cousins had reached the corner of 47th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan to get a view of the parade. The crowd was tremendous, and as the parade passed by, people began to press against them from all sides. Mom realized that they were in danger of getting crushed, and the girls, at their feet, were about to be smothered. Mom picked up my cousin Mary, Aunt Kay picked up my cousin Kathy, and they lifted the girls high over their heads. They didn’t perch the girls on their shoulders, because they were afraid they still might not have been able to breathe. So my mom and my aunt made their way out of the crowd with the children lifted high over everyone else’s heads, because that’s where the air was.
