This is for you, Mom
MOTHER’S DAY WAS NEVER much of a holiday in your family -- which was strange, considering how big it was. (Your family, not the holiday.) Seven brothers and three sisters, which means your mother had 11 occasions to celebrate. But she says it was really no different from any other day.
That’s an exaggeration, of course, or an understatement -- your mother’s two strong suits -- but in truth you have a hard time yourself remembering any particular Mother’s Day. There were homemade cards in grammar school, increasing in ambition as you learned how to put sentences together, then the usual regression to store-bought sentiment as you entered the “difficult teenage years.” Your mother says she has most of those cards somewhere, though she may have thrown a few of them out in the last big housecleaning. Like you, she’s not overly sentimental.
One year you may have bought her flowers -- a plant, actually -- which competed with roses sent from your brother who was away at college. You also seem to recall an attempt to provide breakfast in bed. (A call to your mother confirms this. “I think it was a piece of toast,” she says.) And you remember a lot of family dinners on Sunday afternoons in the springtime, but those weren’t on Mother’s Day, were they? They could have been in April or June.
It wasn’t until you moved away that you started paying more attention to Mother’s Day, as did she. One year you flew in and went for a walk in the arboretum -- admission free on Mother’s Day! -- and afterward you went to visit one of your sisters, by then a mother herself. The conversation tended less toward what you were going to do with your life than what she had done with hers.
For the last few years, in the weeks and days leading up to Mother’s Day, you and your siblings have checked in with each other: What are you doing for Ma? This year so far there’s a sweater, which she already got in the mail and for which you plan to give your brother no end of grief (what, were they sold out of placemats?). There are visits from your sisters, who live nearby, and a longer trip to visit another brother. And everyone always calls.
As for yourself, you’re at a loss. She says she wants nothing, of course, except for all her children to get along, but you can’t deliver that. So you think. She’ll have cards and flowers. You already gave her toast. You want to do something unprecedented.
How about an editorial?
