(Revised version from earlier post, Mother’s Day, 2016)
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…
(From: “What I Learned from My Mother, by Julia Kasdorf, in: Sleeping Preacher, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992)
There’s much that I learned from my mother, just as you may have, much of it more useful as I grew into adulthood, but not the lessons she might have intended for me. I learned less about the domestic tasks Kasdorf describes and more about my mother’s struggle with the prescribed roles of wife, mother and homemaker.
My mother had two faces and a frying pot
where she cooked up her daughters
into girls
before she fixed our dinner…
(From: “From the House of Yemanjá” by Audre Lorde, in: The Selected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997)
My mother was not like the mothers of my friends. We knew she was different, even difficult. She wasn’t the most versatile of cooks; she did not inherit her mother’s talent in the kitchen nor take pleasure in producing the daily meals for her family. She preferred physical labor, daily scrubbing and housecleaning, yard work and gardening, and in turn, she felt those same tasks were necessary to build good character in her children. We were assigned daily and chores which had to be completed before school or play, and every Saturday, we protested and complained as we scrubbed walls as floors while our friends waited impatiently for us to join them. Of my parents, she was the strict disciplinarian and prided herself on the role. Any successes we had in school or life, she was quick to remind us, were due to the discipline she imposed. While my father, naturally playful and soft-hearted, had my heart, my mother had my obedience, embarrassment and rebellion.
Many years later, as the mother of two strong-willed daughters, I began to understand some of my mother’s struggles more than I had in my earlier years. I weathered the storms of adolescence as a single mother, experiencing their affection one day and rebelliousness the next, all as I attempted to parent, earn a living and build a career. I developed greater empathy for my mother—and much greater appreciation of what it meant to be a mother myself.
I see her doing something simple, paying bills,
or leafing through a magazine or book,
and wish that I could say, and she could hear,
that now I start to understand her love
for all of us, the fullness of it.
It burns there in the past, beyond my reach,
a modest lamp.
(“Mother’s Day,” by David Young, in: Field of Light and Shadow, 2011)
A dozen years ago, my mother died peacefully in a home for Alzheimer’s patients. Her descent into senility escalated as my father passed away from lung cancer. The woman who was always in control of everything –or so we assumed—wasn’t in control at all. My father had been quietly covering the signs of her illness as best he could. The irony was, of course, that as the disease progressed, my mother became docile, sweet and affectionate in ways we’d experienced only rarely in our youth. Yet out of the darkness, and in a fleeting moment of clarity, the mother we remembered reappeared. She loved her children as ferociously as she attacked life, yet she remained critical of us even as her mind deteriorated. She was proud of what we each had accomplished, and yet she had always expected more. She left a legacy of conflicted feelings among her children, wounds that were never healed, and old jealousies bred in the competition she fostered between her children. Yet I’m left with the feeling that my mother did the best she was capable of doing. It wasn’t neither ideal nor even good mothering at times, but she wanted the best for us, that part is undeniable. I choose, on this Mother’s Day, to remember that although her kind of love was difficult sometimes, it was love just the same.
During one of the last times I visited her before she died she no longer had the ability to walk, nor was she aware of much around her, including me. I resorted to pushing her in her wheelchair, round and round the garden of the Alzheimer’s home before stopping to rest and sit with her next to a Bougainvillea full of brilliant red blooms. She didn’t seem to notice anything, her eyes were closed and I thought she was dozing. I took her hand and held it in mine and, feeling completely at a loss, began softly singing a song she often sang to us as children. “Let me call you sweetheart…,” I began, my voice tentative. “I’m in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me too…” She opened her eyes and slowly raised her head to look directly at me. I saw the glimpse of recognition in her eyes.
“Why, it’s Sha-ron!” She spoke my name slowly, elongating the syllables.
“Yes Mom, it’s me. Your eldest daughter.” I said, tears filling my eyes. I squeezed her hand.
“I’m…hap-py,” she said slowly, smiling a little. She closed her eyes as her head nodded toward her chest, and she disappeared once more into her darkness. It was only two or three weeks later that my mother passed away.
It’s taken me time to sift through all my mother was and meant to me. Relationships with our mothers can sometimes be complicated, as mine was. Yet she was my mother, and I am her daughter. There are mornings I look in the mirror and see something of her there too, just as all of her adult children likely do. If I could, I would now tell all that’s in my heart, maybe write her the long overdue letter I always meant to write, but like Wallace Stegner, writing to his mother long after her death, it’s too little, “much too late.”
“All you can do is try,” you used to tell me when I was scared of undertaking something. You got me to undertake many things I would have not dared undertake without your encouragement. You also taught me how to take defeat when it came, and it was bound to now and then. You taught me that if it hadn’t killed me it was probably good for me…
(From: “Letter, Much Too Late, in:Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1992)
Today we honor our mothers and what it means to be a mother. There are many stories to be told as you remember your own. Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers and those who also took on a mothering role in our lives when we needed it most.
Writing Suggestions:
We learn from our mothers lessons of love and life, some of them not appreciated or understood completely until we’re much older.
- What lessons did your mother teach you?
- How have those lessons or experiences influenced your life?
- If you have since become a mother, do you find yourself acting in ways as you remember your mother did?
- Write about the relationship you had with your mother. Was it close? Conflicted? Distant? Explore the things that made it so.
- What do you want to say to your mother this Mother’s Day?