I suppose what I’m getting at is that it has been dawning on me lately that the number of days I have in front of me are probably a lot fewer than the days behind me, and that realization seems to be changing the way I think in many ways. Today, it seems to have affected the way I think about Mothers’ Day.
For the first half of my life, my thought process about Mothers’ Day was usually something along the lines of, “What? Mothers’ Day was when? Shit.” And for the past 23 years, I am reluctant to admit, my first thought at the annual onslaught of Hallmark commercials and “He went to Jared!”, has been, “Mothers Day? Ha! I’m off the hook for that one.”
But then this morning, as I scrolled through Facebook and the inevitable Olan Mills portraits and clichéd poems about twinkling stars and roses, I began to think differently. I began to think about Mom.
What can I possibly say about Mom? How does one begin? I had just turned 28 when she died, old enough to be a grown man, but too young to be a wise one. I think about her every day. My regrets, such as they are, are usually about things like unresolved issues and not having enough time to allow life to play out. For instance, I don’t think my mother ever really came to terms with my being gay. I mean, she had accepted it, but more the way somebody accepts the price of milk or being treated like a criminal at the airport: like it’s a fact of life, something you can’t really change, although you’re not necessarily happy about it. Over the years, I’ve wondered whether she ever would have been able to embrace me as a whole person, whether the person I grew into and the changes in the world around us would have been able to convince her to finally make that leap. Would she have loved Mark, or would she smile feebly and refer to him as “that Mark person” when we talked? One can never know, one can only hope.
It’s hard to pin down something like memories of your mom. There are so many, and they are all so different. There are those early memories, when Mom was a warm hand to hold at the shopping plaza. There’s Angry Mom; yeah lots of Angry Mom. There’s the Mom who used to ride her bike to the pool club every day in the summer, and the Mom who was so frustrated a few years later because some unnamed disease had made that impossible. There’s the Mom who once in a while would spend the afternoons having one too many glasses of sherry with her girlfriends from the neighborhood; and the Mom who knew exactly which buttons to push, ‘nuff said.
There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. From her I have inherited my wicked sense of humor, the slightly off-center way I have of looking at the world. She taught me not to fear or disregard people because they look different than I do, or believe in a different God or speak a different language. She taught me that blind people see with their hands.
She smoked Chesterfield Kings, with no filter, right up until the day she died. Do they even make Chesterfields any more? She may have been the last person alive who smoked them. For a while, they came with coupons attached to the cigarette packs, which you could save up and redeem for things like lamps or dart boards, or, presumably with enough points, an iron lung. We had a drawer in the kitchen which was stuffed so full of these coupons that it could barely be opened. I don’t think we ever got the dart board.
One day, I was up in my bedroom and I heard what I thought was popcorn, somehow being furiously popped downstairs. When I went down to investigate, I saw that it was actually my mom, pounding away manically on the old manual Underwood typewriter we kept in the basement. Some muse or other had struck, and she was writing away, probably one of her Erma Bombeck-style commentaries about life, or a funny poem about Little League, or something like that. This is definitely a behavior I have inherited from my mother, except now I am pounding away furiously on the keys of a laptop and my husband is eyeing me dubiously, always suspicious that I’m actually conducting some kind of online affair.
My mother was always what I would call a staunch Kennedy Democrat. As a matter of fact, in our generation of Irish-Americans, Jack Kennedy was a de facto saint; every good Irish Catholic household had at least one crucifix, one plaque declaring “Erin Go Bragh” and one portrait of JFK somewhere in the house. She would have looked at the current, rather unfiltered view of Kennedy as a kind of philandering bon-vivant, as blasphemy. What all this means, though, is that she instilled in me that sort of early-1960s view of America as being full of promise, a country which at heart knows what is right and where it must head. The old “I see things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?’” mindset. What would she think of America today? Well, if she could have survived the George W. Bush presidency without committing outright rebellion, I think she would be hopeful, if not pleased.
My dad went to my wedding. I wish my Mom could have.
So, today, I will remember my mom. I will remember her at her best and at her worst all in the same moment. I will remember the things she said, which I still say; and the thousands of ways which she made me the man I am today. And I will try to remember the person she wanted me to be, and the mom who, when it was all said and done, just wanted me to be happy. And possibly give her grandchildren.
Happy Mothers’ day, Mom.
