The Mother of All Days

Mother’s Day Shmother’s Day. What about the other 364 days? There’s nothing tricky or particularly noble about springing for a last-minute garden gnome or potted geranium one day a year to thank your mom for…oh, I dunno…willingly pushing your bowling ball head through her own tiny, delicate passageway so she can suffer & toil through the next 20, 30, 40 or more years of this experiment that is your life. Just ask me. I KNOW what I was like as a teen (O lord), and I got my mom a garden statue for Mother’s Day this year…

I’ll try to contain my rant about how women are (as John Lennon suggested more controversially), the slaves of the world. Or how moms who work outside the home are STILL expected (often in unspoken but well-understood language) to also provide the bulk of child rearing, home care, meal planning & prep, laundry & sheet-changing, wifery and other essential services. Or how moms (because they’re typically the primary child care givers) so often bear the brunt of tantrums, ER visits, serious sass, disgusting petrified socks in the back of a closet, broken hearts, and torturous years of brooding teen angst—not to mention frangi-pangi incense and bad electric guitar. Or how Mother’s Day dinner often involves Mom in the kitchen again, sweating through another hot flash, looking for 6” of free counter space amid the piles of dirty dishes she’ll wash later, as she tries to perfectly time your baked lasagna and broccoli au gratin. And then she’d better come to the table smiling, dammit. Yikes…did I say I’d try to contain all that? Silly me.

One of the many things I love about being a midlife woman is that I now have a strange panoramic vision that lets me view at once my children, grandchildren, the Grand Matriarch (my mom), and ghost images of my grandmother. And because I can now clearly see from each of these perspectives what my mom endured, I slam my head against the fridge several times a day in penance. And I’m probably a baaad person for secretly grinning, now that I have grandkids, whenever my children run smack-dab into their own karmic dirty socks.

So this Mother’s Day, I offer a poem for my mom. And EVERY day, I honor the difficulty, sacrifices, power, sorrow and continuing beauty of her life. I offer my gratitude to the Universe that she’s still here, still patiently teaching me (clearly, I have MUCH more to learn). I apologize to her for, well, 1961 through 1985. And I bestow whatever blessings I can on my daughter, my daughter-in-law, my sisters-in-law and my granddaughter—to all mothers and mothers-in-the-making. And for those of you moms expected to cook a Mother’s Day dinner, remember that a boatload of cayenne pepper in the sauce livens up the party, and you won’t be hungry by the time it’s all on the table, anyway…

INVOCATION

If you were any more alive in me, Mother,

my heart would burst, split open

like a ripe peach soaked in holy water.

Whisper from every corner of this clapboard

cathedral, Our Lady of Perpetual Chores,

your small and powerful prayers:

white coral bells

itsy bitsy spider

battle hymn of the republic

Chant caramel pudding and corn casserole

recipes, ancient sacred texts handed down

from your own mother, that dark marble saint

atop the bell tower, one arm wrapped around

a gilded laundry basket, a silver pressure cooker

cradled in the other. Her heart, too, burst open.

Keep me, I ask, in your blessing of trying, failing,

laughing about failure. Grant me the grace

of history, repeated mistakes, and promise.

Look down on me with love when they raise you

to the bell tower, at the way I sing your praises

off-key, from behind my daughter’s stove.