The world has changed in many good ways. All over my newsfeed yesterday and today are posts about aching, loss, grief and divorcing from parents. Mother's Day, Father's Day and other holidays can be hard. At least that loss isn't experienced only in silence now.
This year, I've seen many posts more complex than greeting cards. That wasn't always so.
I'm not here to tell anyone about how Mother's Day should or might feel and if anger or forgiveness is good or bad, toxic or healthy or what that entirely individual journey should look like.
Like I would know.
I can share that at 50 I am not in agony this Mother's Day. I remember the years, when in pain, I'd run to the phone with the primal urge to tell my mother. My husband would say, "Put down the phone," pleading knowing a call would likely turn bad to worse in ways surprising to only me and not to anyone who loved me.
"Put down the phone," he would say the way one reasons with a person sober years who is considering a drink. I rarely listened. I was sure if I expressed my needs or feelings or experiences differently I would get the response I craved. The validation or being believed or nurtured or cherished.
I had to find other ways to fill that desperate craving, to allow myself to feel it and use it as fuel to learn how to mother myself and my own kid. But it's been long and not easy and still I work it. However, this year I can share that I'm not dreading Mother's Day.
That's a relief and pretty new. I I love being a mother and a day to celebrate that some, with a daughter who knows I love greeting cards will probably be lovely. I will go and be with my mom who is not yet 70 and my sister and sister-in-law to have lunch and get our toenails done. Our daughters will join us and the men for food.
There were some years I boycotted Mother's Day like a protest. Other years I went fuming and feeling invisible. Sometimes I said I was sick or had a headache when what I was just sad.
This year I thought of wrapping a big box, wrapping it with tissue paper and a red bow and inside putting the word forgiveness and letting my mother have that. But the truth is I've had this thought for years now and have never done it. Forgiveness is a gift I've been afraid I'd want back or would regret giving.. as though forgiveness, even if it's only a small amount doesn't count for anything. As if only total, forever and unconditional forgiveness has merit. Maybe that's what I have wrong?
I don't know what percentage of forgiveness I have and how it stacks up next to anger. I know at 50 that there is not one single solitary thing my mother had that she did not give to me. She failed me. She didn't protect me. She chose partners poorly one could say and in some moments I have screamed in my journal about how she opened the door wide to almost everyone who hurt and stole from me.
But she wasn't willingly inflicting pain on me. I've been wounded, it's true and I also know my mother did and does love me, maybe even adores me. She's proud of me, often, and also puzzled by me as well. We aren't easy with one another, don't laugh or joke or talk politics or recipes. We don't chit chat or belly laugh and I may make her as nervous as she makes me.
She loved me and did the best she could. I believe that. And I know that there were years that were agonizingly hard as a result. And that learning to mother has been arduous as learning a new language while in the middle of traffic without money or food in another country alone.
I've been a stranger at times and had to learn to inhabit myself and the world.
But I also learned a lot from my mom. To work hard, to love reading and even, ironically, to speak up considering who I have spoken up to most is her.
My mother got me diaries and books and pets and was proud of how hard I worked in school. Those things maybe saved me. She drove me all over at times and she helped me pay for college and she kept a roof over our heads and worked hard, full-time, for my whole life. I was not grateful or appreciative and I often romanticized my father, violent and absent, while raging at her, who was present and did not strike me.
My mother parented without supportive partners in her first two marriages and she had a hand full of cards filled with ACEs too. She lived through violence and addiction and chaos as a child and teen mother and young woman. She battled cancer in her early twenties and had three kids before she turned twenty-one. She had two husbands who provided no emotional or financial support of any substance. Her third marriage has lasted and the guy my daughter calls Gramp is safe and sober and signs greeting cards.
On this weekend, approaching Mother's Day, I share a piece of writing I did when younger, before I heard of ACEs and when I couldn't write directly about trauma or my childhood. In writing, I'd hint at my story and was always trying to understand it and the world.
It's Mother's Day weekend and sometimes life starts, stays and ends complicated. Sometimes things shift. Sometimes forgiveness and anger are buoys that mark the water. I can't say they don't have value or don't matter.
Chasing the Blues
I was eight-years old, at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, building sand castles and digging rivers in the sand. I didn’t care that I had a patch covering my good eye to strengthen my bad eye, or was wearing the putrid yellow bathing suit handed down from Nana who had sewn daisy patches on the breasts to bunch up the extra material my child chest didn’t need.
The sun cooked the skin on my back, warmed my shoulders and dried the mud on my hands turning to it back to sand. My stomach told me it was almost dinner time. I was tired; a good tired, the way a farmer gets tired after a day in the field, the way an artist gets tired after hours in a pottery studio.
I looked up and saw the sandbar was gone. The place where I had written E L L I E, the name of my dog, had been washed over. There was hardly any room left to work. Then I saw the silver flecks of light, dancing with the waves, moving closer and closer, like a swarm of pulsing dragon flies. The tide kept coming and with it, the minnows.
I wanted to touch them, catch them. When the waves receded, the minnows were left on the sand. They jumped like Frisbees expecting to be caught by the ocean. But they weren’t. They waited on the sand and so did I.
Do fish pray? That’s what I wonder now. Were they praying for the water to engulf them, wondering what they had done to made the tide turn away?
I ran to the edge where water met sand. At first I was careful, trying not to squish them as I threw them back in. How many could there be? I grabbed handful after handful. My mother who was reading on her chair, away from the water and close to the road.
“Help me,” I said and noticed older boys standing in a group, giggling. “Help me!” I repeated. My mother walked towards me, her shoulder-length curls bouncing in the wind.
“What’s so funny? They are dying. It’s not funny,” I said to my mother hoping the boys would hear and feel bad.
“There are just so many Cis. It’s nature’s way,” she said.
“Can you help me, help me put them back?” I said.
She did, as did a few strangers – mostly older couples. We speckled the shore line trying to undo what nature kept doing, feeble, like people passing water in thimble-size buckets trying to soak the rage of a fire.
“I think we’ve got them all Cis…..”
“No we don’t. We don’t, Mom.”
“That’s all that can be done,” she said.
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
“Cis, we need to go,” she said.
“But Mom…” I said, standing up, trying not to look down at the remaining minnows.
I was tired, hungry and wanted to go but didn’t want to abandon the fish. My mother grabbed my bucket and pale. I followed. We lumbered through the ankle-deep sand to her chair. She slipped into her Dr. Scholl’s and palmed her Newport Lights. She was twenty-six and wearing cut-off jeans and a t-shirt. Her strong legs were tan and looked bare, so different than the nylons and work clothes I was used to seeing.
She turned me away from the ocean and towards the street, wrapped a towel around me and kept her hand on my shoulder as we walked back towards the cottage.
"Why does the ocean throw away the minnows?” I said.
“Because the mackerel are running. They chase the minnows to the shore so they are easier to catch,” she said.
“Fish eat other fish?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “They do,” she said.
“So it’s the mackerels fault,” I said.
“No,” she said, “They are getting chased by the blues.”
“Well then I hate the blues. They are mean,” I said.
”They don’t do it to be mean, Cis. That’s how they survive,” she said.
”Can’t they eat seaweed?” I said.
“But they don’t,” she said.
“Why? Why can’t they?” I said.
“Because they don’t. Fish eat other fish. We eat the fish,” she said.
“Well I hate fishermen,” I said. “I hope they catch nothing. I hope they prick their fingers on those hooks.”
“That’s not nice Cissy. I don’t think you mean that,” she said.
“Uh, huh. I do,” I said. “Those stupid vests and hooks.”
Now I remember those fisherman, how they searched for perfect spots on the jetty, how they unpacked for a day, pulling out bait and sandwiches, how the yellow mustard dried on their mustaches and beards. I ran into them at the register in the corner store where they bought worms and I bought pixie sticks.
When we got back to the cottage, I could see the silhouette of my step-father through the screen door. He sat at the head of the dining room table, his hairy chest uncovered, his belly hanging over his the thick black belt holding up his work pants, playing solitaire. He was older and less healthy than my mother. He had emphysema and spent the first hour of each morning coughing phlegm into the sink, gripping the counter top, red-faced and fighting for air. His coughing, loud and violent, was the morning alarm; it shook the house but didn’t keep him from smoking.
I remember doing the math once on the scrap of a napkin and yelling out to my mother, “Dad is twice your age,” and I meant it the way a child means things – literally. He was 52. She was 26.
As my mother opened the screen door of the cottage it slammed behind her. She turned quickly and we were sharing the top step, me outside, her inside, facing each other.
“I’m sorry Cis,” she said.
“I know,” I said, “But who gets the fisherman?”
She looked up and away, at the sky, over my head.
“Look at that jet stream. Just look at it,” she said.
“You know I can’t see that far with this patch,” I said.
“Well you could at least look,” she said.
“You could at least answer me,” I said. “Who gets the fisherman?”
“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” he said from the table, “I don’t like your tone.”
“God, I guess,” she whispered, and turned from the sky, dropping all but her cigarettes and yellow lighter on the red vinyl chair by the door.
She grabbed the air for me and motioned me towards the table.
“Sit down while I make dinner,” she said and nodded a hello to my step-father. I watched his hands, shuffling and setting up the cards, the speed at which he could mix them was impressive. Over and over he seemed to split the deck in half and spray the cards down into each other as two piles disappeared into one. I practiced those moves in my bedroom at night trying to make the thick cards snap and dance the way he could.
We had hot dogs and macaroni salad for dinner.
“You smell,” my sister said as she sat next to me.
My hands reeked of fish but I refused to wash them.
“Leave her alone,” my mother said with a protective tone.
My sister was quiet. Everyone was.
“Do they all die, Mom? Do all of the fish die? The minnows, the mackerels and the blues?” I asked her.
“Oh Cissy,” she said, and released her signature heavy sigh, the same one she let out at the end of every cigarette before deciding whether to light another – or mourn it as though her last.
“Do they all just die, Mom?” I asked.
“You ask your mother too many questions,” my step-father said.
“Fine, I’m going to bed,” I said starting to get up.
“You haven’t been excused young lady,” he said.
“Let her go,” my mother said, putting her hand over his.
“Not just yet,” he said, pulling me towards his lap, grabbing a shoulder strap and kissing my cheek with his slippery lips. I turned my face away and tried to catch my mother’s eye.
She sat in the chair adjacent to his and used a hand to pull her plastic yellow ashtray closer. She breathed in deeply after the end was lit and stared up into the dusty chandelier hanging over the table.
“Every year some of them survive,” she exhaled.
My towel hung over my shoulder and followed me as if it were a wet and dirty cape being dragged up each step. When I got to the bedroom, I stared at the bed, decided not to change, climbed under the covers with my sandy-bottomed bathing suit still on.
Pushing the pillows off of the bed, I slid under the covers. I rested my head on the mattress and clutched the towel before wrapping it around my ears so I couldn’t hear the waves hitting the shore.
P.S. My mother gave me the print one year on Mother's Day because I collect sea glass.
Comments (0)