Mother's Day

On Sunday what I had thought were allergies finally revealed themselves to be the flu, and I’ve now been pretty much quarantined in my apartment for a few days. Not being able to go anywhere is boring, so I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Scrapbooks that I’m making for Mom Giani and Mom Sherrill. When I came up with the idea I envisioned putting in pictures from as far back as I could find, but in the end I decided to go with pictures that have to do with being a Mom to grown-up kids. It’s all got me being extremely sentimental about daughterhood, so I warn you up front: this post might be really sappy.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to have kids. Sometimes I can almost convince myself that I would be okay never being a mother, but I’m pretty sure that those kinds of thoughts come from fear. Assuming that I do have kids one day, I want to be the kind of mother that I had, the kind that I know Matt had as well. I’m amazed at how many parents out there don’t pay any attention to their children unless they get too loud. In my opinion, kids are supposed to be loud, and if yours are quiet all of the time then something is wrong. There’s a fine line between teaching your child about appropriate behavior and teaching them that they can act as awful as they want as long as they do it quietly.

The kind of patience, and insight, and constant awareness that a real parent has to have is mind-boggling. My fear is that I won’t ever be able to be that selfless, and that my poor children will end up spending their adult lives in therapy.

While a lot of my early memories of religious community life involve my Dad, all of my memories of private spiritual life are of my Mom. I can remember watching her say her prayers, standing silently in the doorway while she sat on the floor at the end of her bed. I always wanted her to wear her red striped dress when we had people over for Baha’i gatherings – I called it her “Fireside Dress”. Any she would wear it frequently when I asked her to, even though she was probably sick of it.

Would I wear the same dress every Friday if my daughter wanted me to? Or would I make up some excuse to disguise the fact that I didn’t want it to seem like I only had one thing to wear?

When I left for college I was shocked at how badly I missed having my mother around. You go through your teenage years wanting to escape, and when you do you suddenly realize that the person in the world who would do absolutely anything for you isn’t around anymore. In Lucy, Jamaica Kinkaid’s protagonist speaks after a falling out with her mother and says that she realizes she’s just ended the first, and perhaps the only real love affair of her life. I never understood that until, for the first time and at the age of nineteen, I felt like my parents weren’t able to be there for me.

Mom Giani and Mom Sherrill are both going through some form of empty-nest syndrome as their youngest children go off to college. I also can’t imagine what it’s like to be a real mother, to spend every second of every day totally subjugating your needs to your children’s, and then to have those children happily prance out of the house with their lives ahead of them. But the idea that children stop needing their mothers when they leave the house is just wrong. As you’re sucked into the emotional vacuum of college life and the real world, your mother is the lifeline that you turn to for guidance. After years of demanding to do things your own way, you suddenly wish that your mother could just decide everything for you because life is too hard and too complicated.

My relationship with my Mom changed a lot after I started college, and as I got married it settled into what it is now. Mothers and adult daughters, like my Mom and myself, are often very sisterly, openly sharing experiences and asking each other for advice. But I don’t think my Mom realizes that this equalized closeness is a functional necessity to mask the reality that I’ll always need her support, and that her power over me is unique. A mother is simply irreplaceable.

Somehow this is what I want the mothers in my life to know: that your children never really stop needing you. There’s no chapter of your life that you go through without your mother, there’s nothing you do that isn’t affected by that relationship. So happy belated holidays to all of the mothers in my life. Sorry I drove you crazy for all of those years – if you feel like getting back at me by driving me crazy sometimes, I won’t hold it against you.