Chance = Change

Hi Momma - Below is a little essay I wrote about Mother's Day, as an assignment in my writing workshop a few months ago, and I thought this would be the good day to share it with you, and with all.

May 8, 2011

San Francisco

Mothers Day

        Anna Jarvis from Grafton, West Virginia, is considered the “mother” of Mothers Day, since it was she who introduced the idea to the general public in 1908.   Her goal was to simply honor all mothers. 

        President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday in 1914, and with the considerable help of storeowner John Wanamaker, Mothers Day became the holiday on which more greeting cards and small gifts are sold than any other day of the year. 

        It became known as “the Hallmark Holiday”, and it eventually so disgusted Ms. Jarvis, (because people bought pre-made cards instead of taking the time and making the heart-felt effort to pen personal notes), that she officially “took back” her Mothers Day Idea in 1948.

        That was the year I was born.

        Great.   

       The year I was born, the mother of Mothers Day disowned her brainchild.

        Which, on some psychic level, leads me to ponder why I never became a mother myself, and also why I never had the arrogance to believe that I fully understood my own. As a kid, I loved pretty packages neatly tied up with bows, but even young, I knew Motherhood was something  too messy, contradictory and powerful to contain.  Too bewildering to easily trust.

            I mean, she was a whole person before I was ever born, a person in her own right, yet she seemed to forget all that and made me the center of everything she cared for to such a degree that she almost disappeared.  I was all that mattered. It wasn’t until years later, when I was established in a life of my own, that I learned she loved red velvet curtains.  She bought some for the first apartment she lived in alone after Daddy died.  I never even knew she loved red.  I don’t understand how I never knew that.

            She had the audacity to take a lover after my father’s death. How could my Mother do that?  Mothers don’t do that! Mothers don’t …y’know…. the sex thing!   That was my specialty!   But there they were: Mother and Albert! Doing it!  A LOT!

(I remember now the hilarious night she and I shared a bottle of Scotch, and I made her say the word “fuck” out loud. I was in a Consciousness Raising class at Northwestern, and it was our holiday assignment to go home and cause a “revolution”: mine was to get my Momma to say a dirty word. She did, and it was marvelous in so many ways.)

          And then, as she got nearer to dying, I grabbed onto that time in an effort to more thoroughly know this woman whose title had been “Evalyn’s Momma”, at least through my entire life, if not hers. I got a special tape recorder so I could have some audio to refer to on that inevitable day when I knew I would forget how she sounded. I spent two weeks out of every month in Chicago, to be by her side. It was then she told me something that made me happy and sad in the same instant: her only regret in dying was that she’d miss what happened next …..in my life. For some reason, that I understood .  I also understood that I had been living my entire life for one audience and one audience only: my Momma. 

        And then – suddenly – there was no more time.  My class in “ Momma” was over, and the bell had rung.  I was so glad I’d used that tape recorder.

        Motherhood is far too complex an undertaking to be honored or epitomized in the corny quatrains of a greeting card. To make one 24-hour period the “special time” to stop and consider this intricate matrix of circumstances, emotions, influences, relationships and consequences seems a peculiarly American thing to attempt, a fast-food approach to the most profound of undertakings: creating the Earth’s next human inhabitants.  One lonely little day – sanctified by Congress or not- just doesn’t seem to do the job.  In fact, like so many “quickies”, it’s just not satisfying on any level.

       SO, along with Ms Anna Jarvis, I too take back “Mothers Day” and all the tacky baby blue, pink and frilly stuff I ever purchased. Every hand-made piece of junk I ever imposed on my Momma, I give her permission to posthumously toss!   Instead, I will raise a glass of Scotch, in honor of the night she said a dirty word or two, and simply drink to a Life that, along with other mysteries, makes motherhood the way things are done to survive.

         And Mothers?  I say, let’s honor them every moment, every hour, every day, month and year, as long as we breathe. Above all, let’s remember them. For without them – and this isn’t hard to understand at all – without them, we are…..not.