Dear Mom, I Understand Now

Don't get me wrong; I love the cards and flowers

I know you enjoyed being treated by your offspring too. After all, mothering is hard work with high stakes, brutal hours, a constantly shifting job description, and an uncertain retirement plan.

As you used to tell me when my kids were little, motherhood is a job you eventually work yourself out of. But the emotional investment never lessens. Motherhood leads otherwise rational women to believe in the prophylactic power of worry, long after their children are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

So yes, it's nice to be recognized

Since you've passed on, many years ago now, I've gone through multiple bouts of downsizing, approaching what the Swedes call death cleaning - and I have thought about you with each purge. Like you did with my awkward productions, I've kept the tributes, tchotchkes, and artwork my sons made for me at school or Scouts or camp. I thought you were being corny when you used to say that stuff meant more to you than fancy furniture or costly bibelots. But now I get it.

I'll part from those trinkets when I shuffle off the mortal coil, and not before. And like I did after you died, my kids can shuttle through a host of emotions when they find their offerings as they clean out my stuff. Some passages aren't meant to be easy.

All those attachments and associations feel natural and organic. Mother's Day, though, feels a little different. Performative. Commercialized. Even mildly forced. Does saying so make me a bad person? Far worse, does it make me a bad mother?

I know you used to be uncomfortable on Mother's Day, and I think I get that too now.

According to History.com, you and I are not alone in having mixed feelings about Mother's Day. Anna Jarvis, who is credited with establishing Mother's Day in the U.S., conceived of it as a day when one would wear a white carnation in honor of Mom, visit her, and probably go to church.

But once it became a nationally recognized holiday in 1914, the greeting card companies, florists, and candy merchants were quick to capitalize on it. Jarvis became so disgusted with the commercialization of the occasion that she launched a campaign against it and tried to get it removed from the American calendar.

Needless to say, trying to cancel Mother's Day didn't get her very far.

Valentine's Day and Mother's Day are have-to's

Even if we all know there's a corporate conspiracy behind Mother's Day, there's really no fighting it without coming across as a total jerk. Especially if you're a mom — how ungracious would it be to reject overtures of love and appreciation?

Like Valentine's Day —so rife with potential heartbreak or embarrassment for everyone from kindergartners to adults — Mother's Day puts us in an emotional bind.

All those beautifully lit, heart-tugging commercials that show three or four generations of smiling women blissfully celebrating with flowers and candy (or jewelry, or new cars, or whatever the advertisers would like you to believe is necessary to prove your love) — yikes.

They tug my heart in a painful direction, especially now that you, Mom, are no longer alive. And you and I had a good, loving relationship. How much harder must it be for those whose time with their mothers has been complicated or disastrous? Or for mothers who have a child whose life trajectory has gone severely off course, or even ended prematurely?

In that sense, Mother's Day is like Christmas: lovely if you're in a position to genuinely celebrate it, intrusive and impossible to avoid if you're not.

As a mother of adult children, I see what you mean

About what you called the strange life cycle of Mother's Day, I mean. In the early days of motherhood, any special treatment on Mom's big day was largely up to our husbands - who, as young fathers trying to find their feet in their new roles were approximately as overwhelmed and bewildered as we were.

Once the kids were out of toddlerhood and slightly more self-sustaining, they could, if properly coached, take on producing some of the festivities themselves. These were the years in which you and I joined the well-worn trope wherein Mom adoringly accepts an inedible breakfast in bed.

But you and I followed a family template that was the default notion of a "traditional" nuclear family: a cisgender female mommy, married to a cisgender male daddy, and the fruit of their (and only their) loins. Fewer and fewer families nowadays align with that template. How does Mother's Day make sense in a family with two moms, or two dads, or any other configuration? They must feel at least as awkward about all the imposed assumptions as did you — and as do I.

In any family, eventually, the fledglings leave the nest — or so it is to be hoped. There follow a number of years while their adult plumage settles in. During this period, Mom faces a dilemma: wait to see if her semi-adult children will get their act together to remember Mother's Day all on their own, or deputize Dad or somebody else to remind them - in which case, do the last-minute deliveries from Flowers R Us really mean all that much?

I know it took me longer than it should have to develop a graceful, genuine way of honoring you and making you feel as special as you deserved to feel — on the same day that my own children and their father felt obligated to make a fuss over me.

Meanwhile, you aged, and so did I. And then you were no longer there at all,  adding further heft to the emotional freight. Mother's Day was forever bittersweet after that.

But none of that explained your discomfort with Mother's Day. Until you told me about the carnations.

White or red?

I was an adult when you haltingly described to me what Mother's Day was like for you growing up. Your own mother died in 1921 when you were only eight years old. Nobody ever told you the cause of her death — you suspected it was from complications of a hysterectomy, which, like so many other things in that place and time, would simply not have been spoken of.

You told me how, when it became evident that my grandmother was not going to recover from whatever it was, you and your older sister were taken to the hospital to bid your mother goodbye.

This is what you remembered: "Be a good girl," she whispered from her deathbed, "and don't fight with the neighbor girl." And then you and your sister were led away. Your mother died a few days later.

Four months after that, your father married the woman who had been your mother's nurse during her illness. In Iowa in the early 1920s, such things weren't particularly unusual.

But your stepmother, while hard-working and competent, was sensitive. She didn't take well to reminders that she wasn't the first wife. So you learned quickly not to mention your dead mother.

At the small-town Methodist church you attended, Mother's Day worked like this: you wore a red carnation if your mother was alive, and a white one if she wasn't.

This placed you, at eight years old, in an inescapable snare. If you wore the white carnation, as you desperately wished to, you risked the silent but abiding resentment of a woman upon whom you depended for care. You could wear the red carnation, pleasing your stepmother and keeping the peace, but at the cost of abandoning your late mother's memory, driving the pain of your unexpressed grief even deeper.

Not that you ever put it to me that way. You simply described the stark choice of the red or white carnations. "I wore the red one," you said, "but I felt bad about it." And that went on every year until you married my father and headed west, leaving Iowa behind for good.

That story made me so sad. "That's just the way things were," you said, shrugging your shoulders with mournful resignation.

You told me that story just once. Later on I would ask you about it, but it wasn't something you liked to talk about. But there hasn't been a Mother's Day since when I didn't picture that bereft little girl in her Sunday dress, having to choose from a tray of red and white carnations.

I've often wondered: why couldn't you have worn two carnations, one of each color?

I wish I'd asked you that when I could.

In your honor on this and every Mother's Day, I'll revel in a floral bouquet of every color — except white and red.

And no carnations.

I love you, Mom. I hope things are easier where you are.

I'm happy to do brunch and eat chocolates

Believe me, I wholeheartedly enjoy and appreciate any treats and overtures that come my way on Mother's Day. Or, any time for that matter. I just don't want my kids to feel like it's a thing they have to do.

On the other hand, I'd be kind of bummed if they didn't. Such is the murky power of a corporate-colonized holiday.

But I'm all in for June 2.

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