Motherhood and Mother’s Day…Enough Already!

It got me to thinking about how well did I know my mother?

I wasn’t going to write about anything related to Mother–enough already with Mother and Mother’s Day–but then I saw a scroll from the NY Times that asked, “How well do you/did you know your mother?” Then I couldn’t find the scroll but it got me to thinking about how well did I know my mother? And I’ve been sucked in.

I know that her favorite color was green and influenced her design choices for our home.

I know that she adored her mother, who we’d visit every Friday afternoon. Grandma Annette would be in bed, her false teeth in a glass of water on the night table, the smell of ointments cloying the air. She died from kidney disease in her early sixties. Whether or not it was from her frequent use of diet pills to lose the pregnancy weight she’d gained with each of her three babies, I don’t know. The only time I saw my mother in tears was at my brother’s bar mitzvah, because Grandma Annette had died not long before the big day and her absence made my mother cry.

I know that my mother was obsessed with her weight. Every morning she’d walk into my bedroom to weigh herself, fully clothed including bulky shoes–oxfords–because she had bad feet (the scale was in my bathroom). She drank coffee and ate grapefruit until dinner time, until the osteoporosis had set in so badly that she’d lost six inches in height and her doctor finally said she had to eat when she took her pills in the morning. Parenthetically, her baby sister who was eleven years younger and who was pretty much raised by my mother was at least 100 pounds overweight. Any time we happen to be eating together and my Aunt Helen would plan on dessert my mother would say, “Helen must you?” Apparently yes. And apparently, the obsession with weight was hereditary, passed down from Grandma Annette to my mother and, of course, to me. As a teenager I was a laxative and diuretic junkie.

I know that she attended NYU, planning to become a nurse but she stopped after two years and went to work as a secretary. That was around the time of the Depression.

I know that my mother had been in love with a doctor who lived in Chicago but her father said she couldn’t marry him because he was “a divorced man.”

I know that when she married my father she lied about her age because she was “too old” not to be married yet. “How old are you,” he asked. My father’s guess became her age from then on. He never knew her real age and I learned of it less than six months before her death.

I know that she was never satisfied with her appearance, that it was a real source of distress for her. I remember one evening watching her ready to go out with my father, struggling with a hat–this particular hat was shiny satin and multi-colored. (A bit much I thought.) Fussing before the mirror, her unhappiness with what she saw was palpable.

I know that for her there was no world outside of New York City. Her one visit to me where I live in upstate New York, she exclaimed “This is the country!”

I know that she was dutiful, that much of her life was dictated by “shoulds” rather than choice. Like putting dinner on the table every night. There was a sequence to the meals that probably made it more manageable. Sundays, always broiled chicken. These days I have more sympathy for what that might’ve been like for her. She wasn’t, innately, a cook.

She always told me how much she loved being a mother. Yet, while I felt she loved me, deeply, I didn’t get the sense that she found parenting to be much fun. An observation that has nothing to do with blame. She’d introjected the belief that wanting to be a mother was the right thing to want. And I don’t think she could imagine otherwise, what an otherwise might be for her.

I don’t know but I surmise that she was disappointed with her life. She never talked about the dreams she had–if she allowed them–that didn’t come to be.

The NY Times caught up with me as I was writing this post: 25 Questions to Bring You Closer to Your Mom. The questions ask about her life before you, her child, came into existence, about motherhood, about your relationship with each other, about her life now if she’s living, and “Just for Fun” questions. Maybe I could answer two questions. They’re good questions, I think, that have relevance apart from motherhood, and that will be a good exercise for me to answer about myself.

My mother died over twenty years ago. Perhaps her greatest gift to me was how easily she let go. I don’t miss her. She wasn’t warm and fuzzy but she was always there. I remember that for Mother’s Day a gardenia wristlet made her feel special. And we’d go out for dinner.

To me, the attention given to Mothers and Mother’s Day and the implicit message, well maybe not so implicit, is that a woman’s essential worth is in mothering. Whatever else we might do with our lives pales in comparison. What say for those of us who’ve missed the calling, at least how it’s been typically defined.

In her post for Mother’s Day,

Heather Cox Richardson

, wrote about Mrs. A who was determined never to be a mother, and who was a vital presence in Richardson’s life. What I loved about this post was that it lifted the role of Mother and Mother’s Day out of the vernacular. Paradoxically, it seems as if the unrelenting attention teetering on adulation of all things Mother once a year is demeaning, even dehumanizing. And it’s limiting, siloing the value of a person–typically a woman–to the mother-role.