Celebrating the stories OF OUR MOTHERS
20 local people will be sharing ‘Mom monologues’ in Hamilton’s ‘Listen to Your Mother’
This will be my second Mother’s Day without my mom, but unlike the first, I’ve found a good way to keep busy.
I’ll be spending the weekend honouring her memory as part of a local production called “Listen to Your Mother.”
This national storytelling show first ran in 2010, directed by writer and performer Ann Imig, in Madison, Wis. It was comprised of original monologues to “give Mom the microphone,” which eventually made it into an anthology. The show has now been offered over 250 times in at least 50 North American cities.
Hamilton’s version of this grassroots phenomenon will be performed at the Players’ Guild of Hamilton, Inc. on Queen Street South, North America’s oldest continuing community theatre. Maureen Dwyer is the instigator and director of this local event, which will see 20 local people sharing “Mom monologues.” Some are original pieces of writing and some are from the anthology.
I wrote “Beautiful Mother” about my mom, Lucy Pike. Here’s a little taste:
Whenever I find myself missing my mom, I go grocery shopping. We loved looking at food together, dreaming about what we could make and remembering what we’d eaten before.
While we wandered the aisles, she’d always have suggestions about how the store could do things better, offering advice to unsuspecting workers.
“You know,” she’d say to the person in produce, “it would be better if you would sell just two or three ribs of celery. Little old ladies like me can’t get through a whole head.”
I would laugh, often more at her than with her, apologize to the staff, and off we’d go.
Since she died just over a year ago, I listen a lot more to my mom’s wisdom. Now I find myself looking at a whole bunch of celery and thinking, “Renée and I will never get through this before half the stalks are rubbery.
Why don’t they just sell two or three?”
It’s too late to heed one piece of advice that still rings in my ears: “Spend time with me now, Deirdre. I won’t be here forever.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” I’d laugh in return, really believing she wasn’t going anywhere soon.
For the last three years of her life, I listened to my mom’s voice more often, even if I ignored her advice. It was the pandemic and we phoned each other every day. Sometimes we conversed over Zoom, but only if she thought she looked beautiful enough.
In 2001, my mom lost her eyesight, and everything became more difficult. She lamented being unable to “put on her face” or do her hair, but she still looked beautiful to me.
And she always smelled beautiful, putting on her signature scent, Beautiful by Estée Lauder. When I was picking up her things at the retirement home after she died, Sammie at the front desk said, “I could always tell your mom was coming down the hall because I could smell her perfume.”
I still take a whiff of her nearly empty bottle when I want to conjure up a memory.
When my mom died, she had a lot of leftover lipstick and over a hundred silk scarves. Inside or out, she was never without one. At her celebration of life, all her female friends and nieces wore lipstick and scarves, but not me.
I was adopted by my mom and dad when it became clear they couldn’t conceive together. My mom originally conceived a dream that I would be a mini her. Eventually, she came to realize her only daughter was not going to be scarf-sporting or lipstick-loving, so she conceived another, more beautiful dream for me: that I would be happy being myself.
The day she died in the emergency room at London’s University Hospital, a place where she had happily volunteered for over a decade, I drove to her retirement home, a place where she unhappily lived out the last eight weeks of her life.
I picked up her favourite black and white polka-dotted silk scarf, a pink quilt she often laid over me when I slept at her apartment and her hearing aid. How would she hear me say my last “I love yous” without it?
We loved each other until she took her last beautiful breath. And now, I listen to her more than ever.