Yesterday was a highly reflective day for me. It was my first Mother's Day without my mom. All the years past filled with brunches, cocktailing and grilling out are now being replaced with trips to the cemetery and countless hours void of emotional gratification. For anyone out there who has lost their mother, here is a wonderful article written by Frank Bruni in the NY Times yesterday. My older brother told me about it yesterday and I just read it this morning; I completely identify with every word he wrote. And, I even did on thing yesterday that he writes about doing himself. Even if you haven't lost a parent, this is a wonderful article to pass on to those you know that have.
Muddling Through Mother’s Day
I’M pretty certain it was six years ago. I know I was in a restaurant. I know, too, that I was a little tipsy — that’s the only way the impulse could have come to me, the only way I would have acted on it.
I went through the names programmed into my cellphone, looking for moms. Tina. She was one, so she got a text message: Happy Mother’s Day. Barbara. She was one, so she got a message as well.
So did Adelle, Lisa, Sylvia. Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Mother’s Day. Saying it to all those other mothers, as if that would make up for not being able to say it to my own.
For anyone who has lost a parent long before he or she expected to, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are unsettling occasions, prompts to show appreciation that become prods to revisit grief.
They’re also proof that the world is full of accidental actuaries. I don’t know how else to explain it: the number of people who look at you and seem to calculate, correctly, that when you’re 33 years old, your mother should not yet be gone, and that there’s a good chance, according to median life expectancies, that she’s still around when you’re 37 and even when you’re 40, unless she had you late.
“Did you send flowers to Mom?” some acquaintance or stranger will ask — a meaningless conversation filler, a verbal tic — and you won’t give the right or full answer, because no offense was intended, and none was taken. You’ll smile, vaguely. Or nod, misleadingly. Or lie, politely, saying “yes,” then changing the topic.
Someone else will tell you to be sure you “don’t forget Mom today.”
To that, at least, your response will be honest:
“I never do.”
My mother did not have me late, not by today’s yardsticks. She was 29. And she did not leave me all that early, not by the standards of tragedy or even the bathetic TV melodramas that she’d half-watch on nights when the cancer or the chemo left her feeling weak, her eyelids fluttering closed as some comforting indignity was visited upon Meredith Baxter or Veronica Hamel or Jaclyn Smith.
She died on Dec. 2, 1996, having held on just long enough for one last boisterous family Thanksgiving and, two days before, her second grandchild’s birth. She missed out on the births of seven more, who know her only from the stories my two brothers and my sister and I tell them and only because we make sure of it.
Soon after she was gone, I became acquainted with one of the oddities of not having two living parents at an age when you’re statistically likely to. People assume.
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” snapped a bouncer with whom I had an ineloquent dispute.
I did, back when I could, just often enough that it wasn’t among my many regrets.
“Your mother must be proud of you,” said a letter from a reader who liked something I’d written.
If I permitted myself a certain religious faith or degree of mysticism, I could persuade myself that she indeed was.
Mother’s Day, I quickly learned, was the feast of the assumptions. I say that without any rancor, but with some bafflement: in a world of so many broken and untraditional families and of so much heartache, why should there be a bouquet-primed mother in the picture? There’s no point to guessing as much.
IF I never knew exactly what to say to the people who guessed, I was even less sure how to mark the day, when I’d always had a meal with Mom if logistically possible, talked with her if not. Usually I just moped. And it’s wrong, the notion that feeling sorry for yourself is counterproductive. Sometimes it’s just the ticket.
But on this Mother’s Day, I’ll trade moping for a testimonial: I was — I am — one of the four luckiest children I know, my siblings being the other three. We had a mother who held us in esteem and held us to account; told us we were magnificent and told us we were miserable; exhorted us to please her but found ways to forgive us when, all too frequently, we didn’t; and made certain that we knew she was there for us until, unimaginably, she wasn’t.
I’m 47 now, and I’ve noticed that in the last few years, the actuaries out there are less prone to reminding me of her absence by wondering idly and aloud about the gift that I did or didn’t remember to purchase, the call that I will or won’t remember to make. At this age and this point, there’s a much diminished probability that I’d have both parents. (I’m grateful for one.) That certainly makes Mother’s Day easier to navigate.
My own mother always appreciated a glass or two.
Frank Bruni, A.P. 2012, May 12. Muddling Through Mother's Day. New York Times.
So if you haven't already guessed, I did send texts to all of the wonderful moms (friends and family) wishing them a perfect day. And yes, it does make up for not being able to say it to my own momma. And yes (again), I had opened a bottle a wine because my momma loved her wine, too. ;)
I love you, mom.
So, this had been cathartic, but I shall refrain from anymore dead mother talk for a while. Stay tuned for regular programming to return tomorrow.
Thanks for all of your support and understanding.
