Mothers' Day
bouquets in Mexico City Photo by YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GettyImages
For years, I hated
Mother's Day. My mother died when I was 22, and every year after
that, when spring rolled around and the greeting cards reared their
heads, I felt the resentment start to bubble up. “Tell mom how much
she really means,” the signs at Hallmark implored me. It felt like
a mean joke, just another reminder of all I’d lost.
My mother and I
had always been close, but in the last few years before she died,
after I’d gone off to college, we’d gotten closer. We emailed a
few times a day, relating the little details of our lives. I knew
what she’d had for lunch, how her best friend’s daughter was
settling into her new apartment. She knew which book I was reading
for my Russian novel class, which of my roommates was pissing me off.
We had catchphrases, inside jokes we’d repeat in the emails and
cards we sent each other.
The first Mother's
Day after she died, passing by some greeting cards in a store, I
thought about buying her one. Maybe, I thought, I could start a
ritual of getting her a card every year—a kind of “taking back”
of the holiday. But then I thought about how I’d never actually
send the cards, how they’d just sit in a drawer somewhere, the way
the flowers I brought to her grave every year just lay there,
wilting, until someone threw them out. And the inside jokes would
never change—my mother and I were frozen in time, like the picture
of us on my nightstand, taken just a couple of months before she
died. I decided not to get her any cards. And I continued to hate
Mother's Day.
But then, a little
more than 4 years ago, I became a mother. I didn’t have to be
excluded from Mother's Day anymore, I realized—I would get cards!
And I have—hastily scribbled by my son, with Thomas the Tank Engine
stickers affixed haphazardly. I have been allowed back into a club
from which I’d long been excluded.
A bit more than a
year ago, I became a mother again—this time to a girl. I am half of
a mother-daughter pair again, and this reality has churned up a
longing I haven’t felt in years. I remember the things my mother
and I liked to do together—the leisurely lunches and shopping
trips, punctuated with laughter and gossip—and I imagine doing
those things with my daughter. I remember how we could confide in
each other our deepest worries—mine usually about a boy I was
pining after, hers substantially deeper, often about her aging
parents—and I imagine doing that with my daughter. I think about
all the things we never got to do, the parts of our relationship we
never got to explore—her giving me parenting advice, me helping her
mourn the loss of a parent—and I imagine having all that with my
daughter. So much seems possible.
And yet, I know I
can’t—shouldn’t—recreate with my children the relationship I
had with my mother. Maybe my daughter won’t like shopping. Maybe my
son won’t email so often. And that’s okay—we’ll do other
things. We’ll have different catchphrases, different inside jokes.
What I do hope
stays the same is the feeling I had, when I would come home late on
weekend nights as a teenager and my mother would be waiting up for me
on the living room couch. She wasn’t waiting to make sure I didn’t
miss curfew—she simply couldn’t sleep soundly until she knew I
was home, safe. At the time, I teased her for being neurotic, but
even then, it felt like a warm hug. That’s what my mother gave me,
above everything else: the feeling that she was looking out for me,
cheering me on, loving me with such purpose. I hope I can give my
children that; to know that I had would be the best kind of gift.
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