I sat for a few minutes tonight watching the Mother’s Day tributes flow through social media, all those selfies of people – mostly women, I noticed – hugging or kissing their mothers, missing them and remembering them in the most loving of ways.
Many talked about how much they missed their mothers, some dead for years.
I duck on Mother’s Day, so does Maria.
It is not our holiday.
I don’t want to rain on anybody else’s parade, so I just stay out of the way. I feel like hiding out in the woods.
One mother I know was on Facebook, she and her husband were celebrating their wonderfulness. She was grateful to her husband for cooking dinner and letting her read a book by herself.
He was very proud of himself; I gathered this was a rare event in their family.
It went on all day, the latest pervasive social obligation children seemed to owe their mothers.
To survive, I believed I had to get away from my mother and father, and so I did. I didn’t see my mother in the final years of her unhappy life. I regret that, but I do understand I had to do it.
I own it, I no longer beat myself up about it.
My mother was a living monument to the need for a feminist movement.
A beautiful, angry, and creative woman, she married the wrong guy, and he squashed every dream she ever had. She was angry, lonely, and frustrated for a half-century in that marriage.
He never once cooked a meal on Mother’s Day so that she could sit and read.
She loved me, but too much, and I had to get away from them and their toxic and destructive dance. Her neediness was suffocating. I kept her away from my daughter.
My mother started a gift shop once in Providence, Rhode Island, managed an art gallery in Atlantic City, and then was hostess and terror of the kitchen at an organic, vegetarian restaurant near Brown University. She was an artist in many ways; she loved art and food and had style.
Maria and I talk all the time about the pain of having difficult relationships with our mothers, on Mother’s Day, I feel as isolated as I ever do on Mother’s Day.
The stream of Mother Love flows online all day like a kind of emotional Niagara Falls.
Are all those people telling the truth? And how could we know?
On Mother’s Day, I’m reminded once again that I am not like other people. For people like me, this is a lonely holiday.
How nice to love one’s mother and remember her so fondly. I spent a half-hour watching this digital stream of love in awe and wonder.
A few years ago, I decided to forgive my mother. She loved me, and she loved my stories. She always saw and supported my creativity.
It was a good decision. I felt lighter and more peaceful.
She had a wonderful sense of humor, looked great, but had a life of bitter disappointment. She often told me she loved me more than anyone in her life. I always thought that was very sad.
At her funeral, her best friend Beulah, who knew her all of her life, told me my mother could never accept the life that was given her, she always wanted something more than to be a housewife and the spouse of somebody better known and more fulfilled.
She could never be happy; she never stopped fighting for more.
This was the unrecognized fate of so many gifted and interesting women.
Today, she would be seen as a victim and a hero, but then, she just shut up and hid her unhappiness, taking it out on my father and her children. She hid her real self from everyone, even Beulah.
She nearly drowned in hopelessness and frustration, doomed to a loveless marriage in a world that offered women very few real choices. You could slice the yearning in her with a knife. The rage also.
I can’t re-write the past and no longer have a chance to come to terms with my mother. I believed she would have loved Maria and loved my blog and pictures. She would have approved of my life; in many ways, it was the life she wanted for herself.
When I stand up in front of a crowded room of people waiting to hear me speak, I am never nervous. She told me I was a brilliant story-teller, and for all of our troubles, I believed her.
When I stand up in front of a crowd, I always think, this is where I should be, this is where I belong.
She did that.
She hated a phony, and I will not dishonor her by being one now. Our feelings for one another were a very mixed and volatile brew, and it doesn’t cut it to say I love her and remember her fondly.
I don’t, and it isn’t that simple. I know Facebook is not a place for authenticity; people put their best feet forward. It’s not the place for me to salute my mother. I don’t trust it for being real.
I respected and admired her, and yes, in many ways, I did love her. I have come to understand how much she loved me.
But I saved my life by getting away from and staying away. I can’t say I’m sorry for that.
Most of all, I forgive her and let go, like all of us, she did the best she could in a challenging and sometimes cruel world. She loved every word I wrote.
Mom, I can’t do the Happy Mother’s Day thing, but I wish you peace and compassion – and maybe that art gallery – wherever you chose to go.
I had a mother who was not very maternal, very mercurial……difficult. Mother’s Day card shopping was always Impossible. Heartfelt, sappy, sentimental cards were all wrong. She’s been gone for 13 years now. I forgave her years ago as the result of a revelation…..it wasn’t her fault! She was the product of whatever weird stuff happened to her growing up. (And therapy helped!) I’ve been a mother for 39 years, and now a grandmother for 7. I love Mother’s Day. I love celebrating my kids and thanking them for making me a mother. And I adore celebrating my daughter and daughters in law who are amazing mothers. I’ve also reached out, in various years, to other women in my life who I admire or who mothered me in one way or another, and thanked them. I don’t dwell on the mother I had, and how our relationship was lacking. Mothers Day doesn’t mean you only celebrate YOUR mother. There are plenty of other mothers to honor.
I too had a difficult relationship with my mother for even some of the same reasons as you, in fact; parts of our story are similar. I understand. I also agree about Facebook.
I believe one of the marks of maturity is the ability to separate ourselves from our parents and view them as people who struggled with their own demons and, in most cases, did the best they could do with what they had, in the time frame within which they lived. It took me a while to get there with my parents, but it was freeing when I finally got there and it allowed me to truly love and appreciate them
This is from my friend Karla McClaren, a great author in the field of empathy.
How Do We Celebrate Our Mothers?
A real-world poem for Mother’s Day
How do we celebrate our mothers —
The ones who are here and the ones who aren’t?
The ones who gave their lives for us,
And the ones who walked away.
The ones who lovingly directed our lives as if we were art projects,
And the ones who never knew how to welcome us into the world.
How do we celebrate our mothers —
The ones who were ready for anything we could bring,
And the ones who were overwhelmed and exhausted by us.
The ones who held themselves liable for every possible outcome in our lives,
And the ones who threw us into the deep end of the pool.
The ones who chose our fathers wisely, carefully,
And the ones who were children themselves, desperate for love, or unable to choose anything at all.
How do we celebrate our mothers —
Do we live out their dreams for themselves and for us?
Or do we fight against their hopes and fears and become the opposite child?
Do we follow their path and parent in their way, in our way, or not at all?
Do we care for our mothers as they age, and mother them as they die?
Or do we lose them before we can care for them, or before we know who they — and we — are?
How do we celebrate our mothers?
The complex ones and the simple ones,
The peaceful ones and the raging ones,
The ones who created stability,
And the ones who shook the ground under our feet.
How do we celebrate our mothers?
~Karla McLaren
Thank you for presenting the other side of Mother’s Day, Ron, Beth and I miss you and we hope you are well; we know you are happy. Your happiness shines through your writing and decorated the world.
Was the restaurant Amara’s? Ate there all the time.
“slice the yearning with a knife” very powerful !!!!!!!!
Thanks again for your raw honestly. Another powerful read.
…and don’t those yellow pansies look like Zinnia?!
I really appreciate this post…written from your own personal lens of experience…I did post pictures of my mom…but not gushing. She shared many of the frustrations and the sense of being held back in marriage….my dad had his own share of dashed dreams. But anyway, I’ve very little energy for writing these days….but just wanted to say that this quote came to mind as I read your post. I read it a good long while ago…don’t remember much else from the book but this really hit me apparently it came back so clearly. I think it fits here. Though I feel similarly about both my parents…missing them and yet knowing that I could never get truly close to them when they were alive, for many reasons including a stifling sentimentality, my process of moving on is rooted in a paradigm of faith, less about psychological coming to terms. I don’t have to figure things out….I’ll never have the kind of equipment that requires. Here’s the quote Jon. Blessings.
“In fact what I regret most about my relationship with my father is that it did not improve until after his death. For a long time I felt so shut off from him that we were unable to talk. I hadn’t the experience as a younger woman, to ask the questions I would ask now. Alice Walker Living by the Word, p9”