In the kitchen that dreaded Sunday in May last year, my insides rumbled, not with hunger, but an old gnawing, reawakened. “Happy Mother’s Day,” Joe had said as we dressed. “Thank you.” The kids would call or text later. Now that they’re grown, we keep it simple.
I scrambled eggs, and Joe buttered toast. We poured coffee and ate, but the gnawing hardened. It could erupt. That would create a mess. After breakfast, I curled up in a cushy gray chair facing the windows overlooking the river.
That first Mother’s Day after my stepmother legally adopted us, we gave her geraniums. I was 13. “Thank you,” she said, smiling wide. “These will brighten up the front door.”
Though I’d “consented” to changing my birth certificate as the adoption process required, I froze at her next words. “I was wondering . . . I’d like to ask you, . . . to call me Mom,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically shy. Our new baby brother would call her that, so then we’d all be the same, she noted further.
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The first time Dad brought you by, I did not consider what the encounter might bode. My mom had died several years earlier, and Dad kept his socializing mostly separate from our home life. We embraced the freedom his regular outings provided.
You and Dad were dressed up for an event, and my glance took in your colorful long dress and cherry red lips. I wonder now, what did you see? Did you recognize a motherless girl, age 10?
I loved to read and always had a stack of books from the library. Our neighbor who picked us up from school took us along with her kids every few weeks, a kindness that meant everything to me. Books were my refuge. I could immerse myself in alternate worlds where moms made cookies after school and families helped each other and worked out their conflicts tidily.
The freedom of Dad’s absences meant there was no yelling for leaving shoes in the TV room or dirty dishes on the counter, not that we loved fixing our own dinner and putting ourselves to bed alone.
At 10, I was a Girl Scout. I loved social studies but not math. I was protective and maternal toward my brothers. I’d always resented my older sister, because her blindness meant she got my mom’s attention, and then later I had to help her more.
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I can’t call you Mom anymore. I need to call you by your name.
Do you remember when you came over a few days after my first child’s birth, how freaked out I was, worrying that he looked red and wasn’t breathing? You only nodded without judgement as I called 911.
When the guys in fire gear trooped into the tiny living room, I had been holding him upright as you suggested, and his skin was pink again. Maybe mucous had drained too, I can’t recall. Now I went red, but you said only, “You needed to be sure.”
We’d mothered together so easily when it was your baby, and I was your daughter, your acolyte, absorbing your lessons about bottle feeding, diapering, bathing. You always knew what to do. You never called 911. You never saw that I was a girl who needed to receive nurture, not learn more ways to give it.
Several years before I became a mother for real, my friend’s accident unleashed all the unfelt grief for my mom’s death when I was child, though I shared little of it with you. So much anxiety erupted in the aftermath. And growing awareness that I’m someone else’s daughter.
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On the only Mother’s Days that ever felt easy, my beaming little ones quelled the gnawing with cinnamon rolls and coffee on a tray and hand-drawn cards. When that season ended naturally, developmentally, I experienced it as abandonment anyway.
Though I understand this now, I regret my petulance on subsequent Mother’s Days when the gnawing could no longer be satisfied. My reactions spawned wariness in them about this day, adding another layer to my grief.
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Ag, on that postpartum day together, all I could do was try to get my baby latched on, and you had no instructions to offer. My mothering came from instinct born of necessity. When I saw you with the dust cloth and can of Pledge, then vacuuming, and even scrubbing the bathroom, I went red again. Your baseboards never had a dark line, and your toilet never had a ring. You wanted to keep busy, you said. Now I wonder if I ever told you how much these gestures boosted my spirit.
Decades later I treasure this singular memory of feeling cared for by you, and I wish we’d spoken the truth of who we are to one another. What might we have become? Because mother can be a verb; it doesn’t have to be a name.
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In my cushy chair watching black vultures circle over the river, I wished for . . . something . . . to soothe all the layers activating. The despair of brokenness. Longing for what can never be restored.
That’s what leads to outbursts. Just wanting someone, something, to make it better. Just wanting.
Mother’s Day feels complicated. But the truth is simple. My mother is Mary Lee Wimberg Morse, March 20, 1933-November 5, 1970.
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