Mom never told me she loved me — but she always showed it
Every year right about now, I think to myself, “Why the heck didn’t I remember to write a column for Mother’s Day?”
I suppose I’ve had this tendency since I was a kid. Back then, my father, who never gave me a spare nickel, would hand me two bucks on Mother’s Day weekend when I was headed for the Spring Fair at the Pine Rock Park Firehouse.
“Don’t forget to get something for your mother,” he’d grumble.
And every year, I got her the same gift — a small pot of petunias that she planted over the septic tank until they spread throughout the yard and grew into a colorful menagerie of purple, white and pink flowers.
Whenever I dared to ask my father, “What are you getting her?” his response was always the same: “She’s not my mother.” If there was logic to his reasoning, I couldn’t figure it out.
A bricklayer I worked with named Dickey Dare once told me, “Nobody will love you like your mother.” There’s a lot of truth to that statement, although from reading the daily headlines, you quickly realize motherhood isn’t necessarily what it used to be or what it should be.
If it’s true that nobody will love you like your mother, my mother probably came up short because she never told me she loved me. The words weren’t part of her vocabulary. She had this pathological fear of saying, “I love you.” I don’t know why, I only know that was the reality we lived with.
However, I’m pretty sure she shared that trait with many members of the Greatest Generation, who weren’t inclined to express affection. Quite simply, they weren’t raised to say, “I love you,” probably because they were never told, “I love you.”
They lived in a different world — a harder world but a more genuine world. Now, people are always saying, “I love you” in movies, music, television and casual relationships, but I suspect it’s not real love. Unlike infatuation, real love is willing to sacrifice for another person even when it hurts and even when you get nothing in return. That’s a perfect definition of a mother’s love, and according to that definition, my mother loved us beyond a doubt.
She worked all her life, even after she developed Alzheimer’s. When her workday at the factory was over, she’d come home and make dinner and clean the house. The next morning, she got up and did it again. Sadly, there was no equity when it came to dividing up the household chores.
And whenever a cousin or aunt or friend had a crisis, she was there without hesitation to drive them to the doctor, to visit them in the hospital or to take them for a cancer treatment.
She was the one everyone called when they had an emergency or a heartbreak. She was the one who took me on vacations as a kid, she was the one who drove me back to college in New York City every weekend, she was the one who bought me and my sisters new clothes for school, she was the one who went to visit her mother-in-law in the nursing home every Friday, and she was the one who introduced me to my wife. (To which my wife responds, “No comment.”)
She was also the one who quit school after eighth grade to work at S.S. Kresge in downtown Bridgeport to help support her family during the Great Depression, and she was the one they sent to Stamford to live with her cousins because they couldn’t afford for her to stay at home.
I look back with regret and a certain amount of shame because I never realized how much love she had for me. It’s so easy to take a mother’s love for granted.
By the end of her life, when she was surrounded by her grandchildren, they would constantly tell her, “I love you, Grandma!” But even then, she couldn’t utter those terrifying words. Instead, she’d respond somewhat sheepishly, “Me too.” By that time, however, no one needed to hear her say, “I love you,” because they knew. Actions speak louder than words.
So this year, I’m going to revive an old tradition. I’m going to the garden center to buy a pot of petunias, and I’m going to put them on her grave.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.