It pops up once a year, just when
you're planning your Memorial Day bash: Mother's Day. It's joyful for many, inconvenient for
others, but let's admit, it's downright awkward for those of us who squirm in
front of the Hallmark racks, searching for the one card that will serve the
purpose without compromising our souls, not to mention our wallets. According
to the National Retail Federation, consumers will spend $15.8 billion on
Mother's Day this year, with an average expenditure of $138.63.
By the sixteenth century,
Christianity was the order of the day, and the Roman Empire gave up its bloody
mother's day celebration for a more useful day of worship. The Church swapped
the celebration of the vernal equinox in the middle of March for honoring the
Virgin Mary on fourth Sunday of Lent. Believers made reverent trips back to
their church of origin, their Mother church. This practice came to be known as
going "a-mothering." Non-believers must have gone
"a-fishing," although it wasn't popular at the time to be a
non-believer. (If you were, you didn't spread that information around.)
My parents divorced when I was
around two years old. My mother traded up from a swab jockey, my father
returned from the Pacific, to a slick-dressing purchasing agent where she
worked. I was dropped into the fifties when parents slept in twin beds and no
one — no one — got divorced unless they were movie stars, misfits, or madmen.
Fortunately for me, my grandmother was there with a wide lap, loving arms, and
an Irish woman’s ire to set me on the path and the strength of character to
keep me there. We kept up appearances, but everyone knew, shhhh, she lives with
her grandma because...her parents are... divorced.
At the time, I was oblivious to the
scandal. In fact, I felt kind of special going to visit my mother on the third Sunday
of the month. During those times, she gave me what wisdom she could muster,
like "never squint into the sun, it makes wrinkles" and "put
your bouffant to bed on a silk pillow case." As well as, "never drink
martinis on an empty stomach."
I could compare my mother to Anna
Karenina, driven by desire to leave her young husband and child for another
man, except that she'd made a very good choice that lasted her a lifetime. I
dutifully purchased the mom card every year, though we did little in the way of
bonding. (A big, well deserved “I told you so” coming from Ms. Jarvis.)
My grandmother taught me the
important things, the enduring things, the card-worthy things. That God is Love
with a capitol ell, and that God was my father and my mother, so I wasn't missing
out on anything. She sent me through years of Sunday school, where I was
drilled on the Ten Commandments, The Sermon on the Mount, and the Be-attitudes.
For my liberal education I learned useful dittys like "whistling girls and
crowing hens always come to some bad ends," and "we don't smoke and
we don't chew, and we don't go with boys who do."
Her mother's day card was usually
hand drawn or pasted up as an exercise in grammar school, the words I Love You becoming
more legible as the years passed. Having raised seven children of her own, my
grandmother was Jane Austen's classic mother, worthy of the highest Hallmark
praise. Imagine her shock when, after a string of wild affairs with brunettes
and redheads and air heads, my father finally married an
"appropriate" mother, a person I refer to as Honky-Tonk Ruth. I
spent my next eight years in California's South Bay, a wannabe Gidget, pushing
back hard against her St. Charles, Louisiana influences--a very different kind
of South.
Ruth's hair was too frizzy, her skirts
were too long, she smoked and drank, and sang loud and bawdy at country bars
before karaoke was a sparkle in the inventor's eye. I could never understand
why she pushed so hard. The worst thing I did was cut the pushups out of her
black strapless bra and stuff them in my bathing suit. I would love to have
been a fly on the wall when she discovered the surgery, but she never did—at
least not on my watch. (Would be step mothers of twelve-year-old daughters
beware: you don't stand a chance.) By the time I reached junior high, having
divorced parents was only mildly embarrassing compared to having a
country-singing step mom serving beer at the local bowling alley in a little
black and red chambermaid outfit.
In retrospect, Honky-Tonk was not
all that bad. She taught me my love of Creole cooking--red beans and rice,
shrimp etouffee, and hush puppies—and the finer points of growing your nails
really, really long without the use of acrylics. There are certainly worse
examples of ruthless mothers in literature. The villainous Madame Thenardier of
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables comes to mind. Without my grandmother's teaching,
I might have resented Honky-Tonk's habit of sending my not-quite-ready‑for-
hand-me-down clothing, furniture and toys to her nieces back in St. Charles.
Can't you just see the tab divider among all the cheerful choices in the card
rack: New
Mother, Humorous, Grandma, Religious,
Honky-Tonk, M. Thenardier. Ruth got a gig with country band in Inglewood and
eventually ran away to Calamesa with a red-headed drummer.
Just before I entered my senior
year in high school, my dad—probably in reaction to being left by two age-appropriate
wives—decided to go young. Sweet lady Jane, four years my senior, moved into
our house in Anaheim. A year later they were married. It was like getting a new
big sister instead of a mother. We had a blast. She taught me to propagate
dieffenbachias, smoke pot, broil filet mignon, and eat it voraciously with baked
potato smothered in sour cream and chives followed by pints of Baskin Robbins.
We studied Psycho-Cybernetics and Christian Science. She got a Porsche for her
22nd birthday; I didn't, so I left home and got married.
My mother and I grew closer after I
was married, and had children. She held them at arm’s length, like they were
puppies about to pee. When life in Orange County became intolerable, my husband
and I moved the family up north, and mother and I seldom saw each other. But,
on her 70th birthday, her life fell apart. My step father, Vern, suffered from
Korsikov's Syndrome, a debilitating form of dementia, and it was clear, she
wasn't much better off. I stepped in, put Vern into Alzheimer's care, and took
her into my home without reservation. It was a bittersweet reunion. Friends and
family wondered: how could I devote myself to her when she was never there for
me? The thought never crossed my mind. All I knew was that I had her back, even
if our roles were reversed. I believe I gave her the mothering she never had as
a child and it was healing for both of us.
Should I get the blue ribbon
Hallmark card? Lace and roses and lines of rhyming praise? I honestly don't
know, given my history, how could I? Nature or nurture? I think Buckminster
Fuller had it right: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I learned
a little something and took a little something from each of them, for good or
ill, then added my own triumphs and mistakes to the mix.
I signed that petition to legalize
pot in California. I have recently acquired a tolerance for country music. I am
an avowed Secular Humanist. My grandmother still sits on my shoulder, reminding
me we are all One. My mother was there for my first breath and I was there for
her last.
In 2008, my daughter gave me rosy
pink granddaughter, wide eyed and ready to take her place in our bloodline. I
have very big shoes to fill. How on Earth will I change myself in order to be
good enough for her? My first clue is a secret I've learned about grandmothers:
They have the advantage of hindsight. Things that seem so important in the
brains of a teenager tend to get put into perspective.
Many years after I had children of
my own, I had the opportunity to visit with Honky-Tonk Ruth. Suffering from
emphysema, she had been contacted by her own daughter, one she had given up for
adoption at birth. The daughter was my age. They had re-established their
relationship and she had been welcomed as a grandmother into her birth
daughter's family. She told me she was sorry she was so hard on me; that she
only wanted to protect me from a world that could be cruel to a young girl. I
believe she simply treated me exactly the way her mother treated her and never
saw the obvious. And after raising my own teenage daughter, I had some sympathy
for her.
Sweet lady Jane left my father to
chase another dream and found calamity and regret. The death of my father brought
us back to a friendly place and we keep a thread of connection. My mother is
gone ten years and I still call to her in my dreams, look for her in the
shadows of a late afternoon, and wear her jewelry when I feel lonely. My
grandmother still sits on my shoulder, the voice of reason in an unreasonable
world. There are no cards sitting in any rack that will bring these women closer
to me. Anna Jarvis spent her whole life fighting to call back what she set upon
the world, wasting her inheritance and her life. She never married and never
had any children. That was her undoing. What I take with me on my journey these
days is the weight and the joy of being a grandmother. My baby granddaughter
will face challenges, but she has one thing I never had: a loving, wise, and
very present mother, deserving of all the praise a mother can receive. No card
can express my gratitude for my daughter and her devotion to her child.
Carlos Castaneda tells us in the
Teachings of Don Juan, that we are not whole as women until our child has given
birth. Once that happens, we are mother and daughter still, but we are also
part of a sisterhood of mothers. No card can put that into words.
So go ahead. Enjoy the sappy card
and chocolates if they come your way, it can't hurt. But remember, on Mother's
Day, it is it is the strength of motherhood itself that binds us, runs in our
veins, and carries us on...and on... and on.
My Novel, The Goddess of Undo, is a mother/daughter tour de force about
forgiveness and the strength of the bonds of motherhood.
NOTE: This article originally appeared in The Whole Person Calendar, May, 2010.
