Things We Carry on Mother’s Day

I wish I could say I’ve always liked Mother’s Day. I can see how, if you have a good relationship with your mother, the day pops up in the middle of May like a reminder: Remember how much you love the woman who mothered you. Tell her.

I would stand in the card aisle at the grocery store pulling down cards one by one, reading them and scoffing. My relationship with my mother has never been the kind you’d put in a greeting card. No one wants to send a card that says, “I struggle with loving you.” No one wants to receive that card either.

When I became a mother myself, my mother and I decided it would be water under the bridge. All we’d been through would be erased from memory because of this new baby. New babies are magical, apparently, and cause all kinds of amnesia. Even I had it and believed with my whole heart that things could be different.

And they were different. That part is true. It’s true because I was different. I was a mother now. I had a daughter of my own.

I read a book when my daughter was a baby called The Mission of Motherhood. My biggest takeaway was that, as a mother, I set the tone for my family dynamic. Mothers are the sun and everyone in the household revolves around them. It’s a blessing and a curse.

One time, in a fit of rage with my mother, I told her that she thought she was the sun and that all of us revolved around her, except that she was wrong about me—our relationship didn’t work that way, never did.

This was just a few years ago. We were on the phone and I was mad about what I was always mad about: that she couldn’t see my side and just wanted me to conform. Her greatest line was, “Let’s just be a family.” But to me just being a family meant quietly playing my role in a system that hurt me. I didn’t want to do that. Besides, I was too busy being a mother to my own kids. I was determined to change things.  

This morning, I woke up and was told to stay in bed. A cup of coffee was coming. It was the first request I made on my first Mother’s Day—a morning off and a hot cup of coffee in bed. Back then, with a tiny baby at my side all day every day, it felt like a luxury. Hell, a hot shower alone felt like a luxury, like the hot water could cure the endurance race and exhaustion of every day with a newborn.

So, this morning I sat with my hot cup of coffee and my open notebook. Lily gave me a coupon book with things like 3 extra hugs (1 day) and free TV time. I can see how I might need both of those things on any given day. She filled out a questionnaire about me where she emphasized my painting ability (I haven’t painted anything in a year) and our many and varied card games (including a drawing of the two of us at the kitchen table). Already, I can see us decades from now looking at it and laughing the kind of belly laughs that only nostalgia can bring. The kind with tears—this time is so precious.

By the time I moseyed downstairs for a second cup of coffee, Josh was handing me his gift. He had mistyped his own name on the card and handed me a brown paper bag with a tiny pot inside that he’d painted, a “Mommy pot” to hold the short-stemmed flowers he’d pick for me. Perfect, I thought.

Then he handed me a questionnaire he’d filled out. It says I have brown hair (wrong), that my favorite food is everything (wrong), and that he loves me because I let him play on the trampoline next door. A month ago, I went to Michigan for five days and when I returned all he wanted was for me to rub his back. He said Dad didn’t do that for him, though he didn’t ask because it’s something only Mommy does. Mommy does it best, he said. And it surprised me that he didn’t write that on his questionnaire.

I know Mother’s Day isn’t the best day for everyone. For many, it’s a reminder of loss—loss of mothers, loss of children, loss of children yet to be or children who tried to be but couldn’t. Before Lily, I had miscarried a baby at eleven weeks, a baby whose heartbeat we’d heard and thought we were in the clear. We were wrong and on a Monday night, after working out at the Y, I was bleeding. I called an older friend, not knowing what to do, feeling like I couldn’t breathe. “Go to the hospital,” she said, but she knew I was miscarrying. They couldn’t find a heartbeat, and I laid on the couch for five days, bleeding and crying.

There was no Mother’s Day for me that year.

So, I get it. Mother’s Day is hard. It’s hard and beautiful and endearing and a troubling reminder of our own mortality. What do we have other than today?

This afternoon, I took the kids to the park, so we could go for a hike. The park is right by the lake and I took the longer way, right by the water, where we could see all the big houses that look out over the water.

“I like that house,” Lily said, pointing to a near-mansion, at least three times bigger than our house.

“It’d be fun to live there,” I replied. But all I thought is, who would clean it?

Then she casually suggested we buy one of these houses. I laughed. Yeah, maybe. When we win the lottery, kid.

We drove by a house with enough glass to see through. “What about that one?” she offered. The house was magnificent—glass doors that opened to more glass doors, a chandelier big enough to fill Josh’s tiny bedroom. It sat high above the lake, but you could see the blue waves from the front of the house.

When I was in college, my dream was to live by the sea. I wanted to paint and write poems and nurture my soul with the lull of waves, the crashing of water into land. It was much more like the moors of Wuthering Heights than the shores of Lake Ontario, but the dream is still there inside me.

Maybe we can live by the sea. Maybe I can write poetry again and paint again. There’s muscle memory in that—it’s still inside me.

Just like the pain of loss and the pain of not being enough, the broken relationships and the words I can never take back. Just like the joy of my kids climbing into bed with me and holding my hand on a hike, or the two of them waving their hands out the windows while I drive down a winding lake road, hair blowing in the wind, noticing that the air is a bit cooler by the water and wondering what it might be like to live by the sea.