Mother's Day

Though I am not sure what anyone expects from the holiday called Mother’s Day, it always seemed to me ripe for disappointment. Any card or box of chocolate, any breakfast-in-bed (no, please!) or bouquet of flowers, was a bad mismatch to express either the work or joy of being a mother. But here were, mother and grandmother, ready to quasi-celebrate.

Last year I came up with a Mother’s Day gift that suited me perfectly. I asked each of my children to tell me 3 things they liked about me as a mother. The results ranged from the concrete to the abstract. One remembered the rhyming scavenger hunt clues I made for their birthday parties and the other appreciated the way I taught them to think about money. Asking them to extend their lists this year seemed piggy.

For me, this Mother’s Day was particularly fraught. I am now the exact age that my own mother was on her last Mother’s Day—she died a week later. Like New Year’s Eve or July 4, Mother’s Day has now become a marker of time. The year she died my brother was with her. Not knowing what to do to “celebrate,” I sent the most outrageous, expensive spray of red roses ever. My father had died 5 weeks earlier. Her cancer, having migrated to her liver, turned her skin and eyes yellowish. Still, that day, we talked cheerfully on the phone about the roses. My mother was tough and smart and optimistic— “Things just work out for me” she would say. I had nothing more to offer.

My daughter and I provided highly valued entertainment and bragging rights for my mother, but she never used the L word. She proudly and effectively served my daughter’s first publicity agent. With Eliza’s writing always at the ready, was read enthusiastically and dramatically at all gatherings of friends. And it wasn’t as if she had no appreciation for me—I was a clear thinker, reliable and kind (sometimes needlessly kind.) But I was already developed. Eliza could turn out to be perfect, a grandmother’s dream.

As a young girl I remember trips to visit my grandmothers. My father’s mother, a widow, lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights with her daughter and a son who was engaged to be married. My mother’s mother, in contrast, lived in a mansion in Paterson, NJ, with a husband to whom she had not spoken in at least 15 years. The NY ones gave hugs and cuddles; the NJ crew offered a handshake, a brushed cheek and an air kiss.

This Mother’s Day I was thinking about how hard it must have been for my mother to have grown up in the family she did, although the stories are indeed memorable. Letters sent home from camp were returned, corrected in red ink. There were elocution lessons, months in Switzerland designed to walk-off undesirable fat while learning French, enrollment in the fanciest private high school in America where Rosalie Rappoport was the only Jew on campus. And despite all that, Rosalie remained cheerful and socially adept and ambitious. And when I complain about my mother’s lack of affection, my daughter points out how well she, in fact, did, given the circumstances.

My daughter is right. I strongly suspect that my mother thought of parenting like an artist thinks about mixing paints: to create a family, she found a man who understood love viscerally and who could compensate for her inability to pass affection onto the next generation. As a baby, when she was too tired to wake for nighttime nursing, it was my father who positioned me for breast feeding and used a band aid to mark where I had last suckled. He could remember the words to any song and with perfect pitch was always ready to sing. Both my parents worked, but he was the caregiver. He felt available. He taught me generosity.

And so I learned mothering at least partly through marriage. Instead of marrying the rich physician or businessman her own mother would have preferred, Rosalie found a guy who could compensate for her failings and with whom she could have fun. Together they taught me to be the mother I was and am so happy to be. Rosalie broadened our worlds and he filled that world with love.

When my parents were both near death, my father turned to their nurse: “It will be fine” he quipped. “She’s the smart one: I am the cute one.”

I love it that my daughter remembers her grandparents. I am also grateful that she remembers standing at the window of her daycare center quietly singing to herself that she misses her mommy. I love it that many years later she tells her partner stories about our family…and that he has the generosity to tell me. I love it that her children will be given the story of family love and that those shades of mixed colors have not washed away.