Why Mother’s Day is hard
Mother’s Day is tough. Father’s Day is smooth sailing. You buy a tie or tie tack or one of those battery-powered tie carousels, the ones that hold more neckwear than a sane man will ever need in his lifetime, dozens of foulards and reps and regimental stripes endlessly rotating in the closet, a lifetime of haphazardly chosen and quickly forgotten presents, forlornly waiting for a glimpse of the outdoors. Throw in a “World’s Greatest Dad” T-shirt, half his weight in chicken wings and a TV tuned to sports, and Dad is blissful.
Mother’s Day offers no such safety. Mother’s Day is a platespinning act, 50 wooden dowels topped by 50 whirling pieces of china, one beleaguered guy in a sequined jumpsuit frantically trying to stop the wobbles, trying to keep everything from crashing.
Mother’s Day demands sentiment but not treacle. It’s the rye bread of holidays: the right amount of schmaltz makes it wonderful; too much, and you ruin it. It’s a day for memories but the right kind of memories, misty and water-colored, as the song says, and leavened with good will. We’ve all fallen victim to various incidents of maternal malpractice. Mother’s Day isn’t the time to dwell on them.
DeLuxe Lanes
My mother, who is Keebleres-que in stature, delivered eight babies, not a one under 9 pounds. The largest tipped the scales at a robust 11 pounds, 13 ounces. That’s a lot of baby. Siring eight kids proves Dad had
an acuity for placing the order. He wasn’t so deft at deliveries.
When Mom went into labor to deliver my brother Mitchell, Dad got so nervous, so agitated, so distracting, that Mom finally said, “Jerry, why don’t you go down to DeLuxe Lanes and bowl a few frames?” Which he gladly did. Mom abided.
Mom abided a lot back then. Once, Dad bought her a vacuum cleaner for Christmas. Mom reacted like he’d given her a diamond tennis bracelet. It was a different time. My parents were working-class products of the 1950s, my father Hugh Beaumont in Wolverine boots, my mother a crinoline dress and pearl necklace shy of being Barbara Billngsley. Dad worked. Mom baked pies and brownies and prepared the meals and tended the house and raised the kids and went to the parentteacher conferences.
She got to know our friends, every Eddie Haskell and Larry Mundello and Lumpy Rutherford we brought over. She filled our house with books and encouraged us to be curious. She did the shopping and paid the bills and did it all without a car: Mom didn’t get her first driver’s license until she was 35.
We loved Dad, but he was on the periphery of our childhood: not a shadow figure but shadowy, a tiny bit out of focus. Mom stood in sharp relief, the center of everything, the straw that stirred the drink. They had separate roles, separate tracks. And that was fine.
Dad was a construction worker, a drywall finisher. On Sundays sometimes after church, he’d drive us around town, pointing out the projects he’d worked on. “See that one there?” he’d ask, pointing at a gigantic office tower. “I built that one.”
Once, he took us out into the country, to show us custom homes his company had built. We walked on sheets of plywood, laid over muddy construction sites, Dad jingling the keys to the show house in his palm. Inside, we gaped at the vaulted ceilings and the working fireplace, and Dad said, “This is what your father does.”
Mom was there, a baby on her hip, a toddler tugging her dress, keeping watch that none of the older kids wandered into the mire outside. “Your father is the best drywall man in the city,” she said.
It was a good life, a comfortable, predictable life.
October sleet
When Dad died, a week before his 40th birthday, everything changed. There were no savings to speak of, and Mom hadn’t worked outside the home for 17 years. Hospital bills chewed up Dad’s life-insurance money. We went from being comfortably working class to being broke, not in some slow, sad decline but instantaneously. A few days after the funeral, the lights literally went out, something that happened on a regular basis from then on.
I was the oldest. I was 17. My youngest sibling was 22 months. Mom was 36.
I was working when Dad died, at Wegman’s Supermarket, collecting emptied grocery carts while a miserable October sleet storm soaked me to the bone. The manager paged me over the PA system. Our clergyman was in the office to break the news and take me home.
We walked into a house full of people, friends and neighbors and people from church, crying and talking quietly. I was cold and wet and tired. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Mom hugged me, hard, harder than she’d ever hugged me before, and said, “I am going to be leaning on you really hard from now on.”
It is a shameful thing to admit, but I hated her when she said that. I didn’t want to be leaned on. I was a kid. I wanted to take a hot shower and put on dry clothes and sleep for six months. I wanted to listen to records and have a girlfriend and be a million miles away from that house and that family and those crying people.
I didn’t leave, not right away, and I did help, but there was a quiet resentment about my service, an unspoken sense that this was more difficult for me than for anyone else. When I could, I left, first for Utah, then for Houston, putting distance between me and a situation I thought soul-crushing and impossible to manage.
Mom couldn’t leave. She buried her husband and went to work. She took a job at Wegman’s, and a second job as a church custodian, and a third job cleaning doctor’s offices. She enrolled at the local community college, first studying to be an audiologist, later changing to elementary education.
Mom became my father writ large, a figure on the periphery, never there. Years later, I teased her that all that time away wasn’t school and work, that I suspected she was sneaking away for fun, too. She said that Dad’s cemetery was halfway between Wegman’s and school. Sometimes she’d park near his headstone. She’d sit there for hours, “trying to figure out how I was going to do this.”
Chocolate diamonds
It took Mom 20 years to get her teaching certificate, a class here, a class there, inching to graduation. She progressed from custodial jobs to tutoring and substitute teaching, always working, never seeming to make enough to pay the bills.
She moved to Houston, degree in hand, and took at job at Grissom Elementary. We helped set up her first classroom. The only books were a 1971 World Book Encyclopedia, missing the “F” volume, and several copies of “Jackie JoynerKersee: Sports Superstar.” Mom loved Grissom, a happy school filled with kids who knew about overdue light bills and not enough money and needing to figure out how they were going to make it, and Grissom loved her.
She has enjoyed sweet successes. Three of her sons are attorneys. Her only daughter earned multiple advanced degrees. There are bunches of grandchildren, growing up in homes filled with books and music and the freedom to be curious about the world. There have been crushing defeats, too, divorce and drugs and disappointments bringing some of her sons to their knees. She has weathered it, the sunshine and the storms. She has figured out how to get through it.
Mom has never remarried, never, so far as I know, even dated. She still wears her wedding band. Dad has been gone for 38 years, 20 years longer than they were married. For her birthday, we all pitched in and booked her a trip to Poland, a place she’s wanted to visit for years. She’s going alone. She’s used to doing things by herself, comfortable doing things by herself.
Which brings me back to the plate spinning. What do you do for the person who cocooned you and half killed herself to bring you to mortality, who always found a way to squeeze hope out of some hopeless situation, who joyfully let you leave when you couldn’t take the pressure and rejoiced in all the good things that happened to you in the wake of that leaving? How do you say thank you? How do you show your gratitude, your love?
We are not a sentimental family. Mom doesn’t like the schmaltz. A greeting card featuring a pen-and-ink sketch of swans below type asking, “What Is A Mother?” isn’t going to cut it.
The TV implores me to show my love with “chocolate diamonds,” but “chocolate diamonds” sounds suspiciously like “brown rocks we can’t sell, so we’re calling them ‘chocolate diamonds’ and hoping some moron buys them.” Besides, Mom is 75. The last gift she asked for wasn’t jewelry; it was a nice hot pad for her hip.
I find my mother in everything I love. I see her humor and her curiosity in my children. I hear her stories in the voices of my siblings. My wife, who is kind and inquisitive, creative and generous and indefatigable, is filled with qualities I first learned to appreciate by watching my mother. Who I am, I am because of that little brownie-baking Polish woman who birthed me.
It’s a humbling thing, a slightly uncomfortable thing, admitting how much one person has influenced my life. But I’ve said it, and it feels good, and the plates are still spinning.
Thank you, Mom.