Mother's Day Thoughts

I never had the relationship with my mother that I wanted. Not as a very young child when I was often sent across the street to be cared for by an older neighbor lady who doted on me.  My mother was too busy with the care of two other children, church work, and her advancing pregnancy.  The baby died within twelve hours a birth. A deep blow I had no inkling of.  I just knew she wasn’t there physically.

Years later, after I read The Primal Scream and penned a letter to my mother, suggesting she had done real damage to me, I was to learn her reason. “I withheld open affection so as not to coddle you,” she defended.

I did not have the relationship with my mom that I wanted as an adolescent when I was diving into books and exploring worlds I knew nothing of. I swam around in ideas that might have drowned me.  I would have loved to discuss the books with my mother. Instead, I found her once, scowling over my mound of library books. “I’m not sure these are the kind of books you want to be reading,” she cautioned me, having paged through some.

I assured I hadn’t read them yet, (a falsehood--I’d read them all) and that I’d return them to the library. Apparently all my mother could see in novels by Sartre or Camus were a sex scene or two, which she wanted to protect my mind from.  So we never discussed existentialism. Or books other than the Bible and light religious books.

I never had the relationship I wanted with my mother, when I was away at college, dreading going home for summer vacation because I knew I’d face lectures from her about the length of my skirts and straightening my hair. So I sent  her flowers on Mother’s Day and recorded that in my journal as a obligation.

I never had the kind of relationship with my mother that I wanted when I gave birth to a child. She appeared for two days, with my father in tow and the cradle he’d crafted for my daughter. But she had to leave quickly, and I found more mothering from the community of people with whom I was sharing my lives than from her.

A few years later, I tried hard.  She was now living in the southern town where I worked as a feature’s editor for a daily newspaper.  She tried hard to connect with me.  I remember the flowers she sent me at work on my birthday. “I’m proud of you,” the card read. But all I could feel was how sad that it had taken her 28 years to say that to me. And so I could not have the kind of relationship with her I wanted, even though I tried with weekly lunch dates. It turned out there was so little to talk about—so many areas that I wanted to talk about were forbidden. So we chatted, but didn’t really talk.

I never had the relationship with my mother when I wrenched myself and my child away from a bad relationship. I wrote her, tried to explain. But she hadn’t seen the letter, amidst other papers I’d enclosed. So when I heard from her next, it was a stony cold voice, wanting to know why I couldn’t be reached at my old phone number.

It was only indirectly that I heard, a few years later, that my mother said I was like the old Etta again.  But we never did talk about my depression, the black hole I clawed my way out of.

I never had the relationship I wanted with my mother. Not when I was yanked out of sleep with fire and sweat, night after night.  By then her mind had slipped to decades earlier. She was a little girl again. No chance to discuss menopause, a word that rarely slipped from the mouth of women of her generation.

And today, in a village in Georgia, she has no idea it is Mother’s Day, and probably will not even remember she is a mother.

And though I never had the relationship I wanted with my mother, I know (now) it is not that she did not love me.  She loved me most, I think, and felt closest to me. But her past, her heritage, her position in life—these things kept her from voicing the love.

And though I never had the relationship I wanted with my mother, I have been gifted with that kind of relationship with my daughter, a daughter who became (and is) my close friend.

So Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I hope you have some lovely little pleasures today. And thanks, Ashley, for being the reason I am a mother.