MOTHER’S DAY, IN ITS INSISTENCE ON SENTIMENT AND BIOLOGY, IS CRUEL TO MANY.
AND IT’S REDUCTIVE TO ALL OF US.
INCLUDING THOSE OF US WHO STILL HAVE MOTHERS, AND LOVE THEM. INCLUDING THOSE WHO ARE THEMSELVES LOVING, LOVABLE MOTHERS.
BUT BEING A MOTHER, AND HAVING A MOTHER , EVEN WHEN IT WORKS BEAUTIFULLY, IS NEVER AS SIMPLE AS A MUG SAYING “WORLD’S BEST MOM.” WE DEMEAN MOTHERHOOD’S COMPLEXITY BY SIMPLIFYING AND SENTIMENTALIZING IT.
MOTHERING, TO ME, IS MUCH BIGGER THAN MOTHERHOOD.
AND IT TRANSCENDS REPRODUCTION. EVEN GENDER.
WHEN WE ENLARGE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MOTHERING, WE BRING WHOLENESS TO OURSELVES. WE MAY EVEN HELP HEAL THE WORLD JUST A LITTLE.
Mother’s Day is tough not only on those whose mothers are no longer alive. But let’s start there.
Everyone who has a mother, and who doesn’t die young, will someday have a motherless Mother’s Day. This will be my sixth.
Loss. The nature of life is, you seem to get given things — not just objects but people, not just people but feelings for them. But these turn out not to be gifts. They are loans.
Our lives, the lives of everyone and everything we love: loans. Our mothers — good, bad, and indifferent (and of course mothers come in all these flavors and countless others) — are loans. Not permanent endowments.
UNSCHEDULED
No telling when these loans’ll be called in, or how. The most profound losses are unscheduled. An opaque curtain hangs between us and our future, always, for which I am glad.
But one thing is certain: whatever our future is, it always includes loss.
I’ve lost some people I love suddenly – to accident, suicide, out-of-the-blue cardiac arrest. I’ve lost other people I love gradually: to old age and decline, a predictable cessation (though never predictable as to precise timing).
As the one left behind here on earth (for now, at least) when people I love, including my mother, have moved on, I can tell you this: gradual loss is easier for the person left behind. Or so it has been for me. Tears are spread out over time.
NOT-SO-SMOOTH SMOOTHIES
For instance: How I wept when my late mother’s caregivers told me she could no longer eat solid food! Now, mind you, my mother was 97 at the time, and it didn’t bother her in the least. She was happy with purees and smoothies; they were much easier for her than solid food, and she slurped them up through the straws with many enthusiastic “Mmms!”
But for me?
Remembering making veal scallopini with her in the kitchen when I was a child, carefully patting the seasoned flour into the flattened veal (she pounded it first, with a special hammer! How amazing was this to me as an attentively watching 6-year-old!) and handing each piece to her to be browned in the sizzling butter.
Remembering going into the city of New York, where she worked, when I was a teenager, to meet her for lunch and walk four blocks to the Indian restaurant where the grains of the rice pilaf were distinctly orange-red and yellow, like confetti.
Remembering our many later-life meals out, and the verbal dyslexia that made her, charmingly and unintentionally, say “I’ll have a shangri-la” when she meant “sangria” (and being oh so careful not to laugh, which would have given great offense)…
To see this woman, the mother with whom I had shared so many adventures around food and eating, reduced to sucking smoothies through a straw… well, I went upstairs, to the bedroom which had once been hers but was now mine, she having been reduced also to living downstairs, on one stair-free level — I went upstairs and cried on and off for the better part of an afternoon.
Yet, I think now those tears were a down-payment on the final grief. Knowing we would share no more meals anticipated the final loss, which, when it came, was less violent than the sudden losses of those others I’d loved.
The gradual process feels natural, more comprehensible. You have time to get used to the coming separation, sort of, by degrees. This over-time grief-grappling is preventive, a flowing brook which sometimes swells to a river, but is never, as with sudden death, a tsunami on an ordinary day at the beach, sweeping away within minutes first beach umbrellas, then cabanas, sunbathers, toddlers with pails and shovels — then everything familiar.
I’ll take gradual letting go to sudden desolation any time. As if any of us is ever offered the choice.
Though, as many will remind you, that no matter how loss visits you, “It’s never easy.”
THE MOTHERS WE LOST… AND THOSE WE NEVER HAD
You will have a motherless Mother’s Day eventually if you take “mother” to mean your literal embodied mother, the physical being who raised you and who (unless you were adopted, created with a surrogate, or raised by a stepmother or single dad) grew you in her own body.
For that mother, like all of us, arrives, is here for awhile, and leaves.
This, as I said, is my sixth motherless Mother’s Day, in this literal sense. But I am not a literalist.
Myself with Charlotte: when I was much younger and she alive, a lovely young mother. Taken, I believe, when she came to visit me at summer camp, circa 1960
What I loved about my mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow, remains with me forever in memory. In this sense, not the looking-down-from-heaven sense, she is always with me.
And what I did not love about her, what was difficult for many of the years of our relationship, though not at the end, is not just forgiven but has proven so useful to me in coming to understand myself (as well as grow in the craft she and I shared; writing). Who she was inheres in what and who I am. I now value the once-tough parts of our loving with as much gratitude as the tenderness.
HEARTLESS & EXCESSIVE SENTIMENT
But even when Charlotte was alive, I had problems with Mother’s Day. It seemed to me excessively sentimental and excessively biological.
What, after all (unless you have fertility problems) is easier than breeding?
Reptiles breed. Cats have kittens, squirrels have baby squirrels. I can’t enshrine an act of biology in itself as having automatic meaning and conferring automatic love. Only some human beings — by no means all — who have babies, actually love and do right by those babies.
Some mothers are simply not very interested in their children. Some couldn’t care less. Some are interested only in how their offspring reflect on them. Some mothers will always celebrate the mean-spirited son who is an attorney more than the son who is a gentle house-painter. Or the other way around.
(In Carolyn See’s book Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers, she suggests that one quickly make a list of the ten most important people in one’s life, “without thinking about it, or trying to make a good impression… without getting fancy about it.” She then makes such a list. And who’s number one? “1. My mother. She was beautiful and funny and she never loved me. In fact, she couldn’t stand me.” Writers are in this sense lucky; difficult people in one’s life, including mothers, often make for excellent material.)
But I digress. My point is, meaning and love come, if they do, not with the act of giving birth, but with the acts, plural and endless, of mothering.
THE MOTHERS WE FIND AND HAVE… WHO MAY NOT BE OUR MOTHERS
Nurturing and nourishing, protecting, encouraging, growing, loving, introducing, educating, listening, of being present as long and in as many dimensions as possible. These are the aspects, I believe, that can be called “mothering”, and I do not think they develop inherently, or exclusively, in the act of giving birth.
I think of mothering, too, as knowing when to let go and leave alone. Of loving that small, then larger, then eventually adult person who came through your portals to be the individual he or she is, separate from your dreams for him or her.
Part of a parent’s job description, I believe, must be to plan for that job’s obsolescence.
This kind of mothering has little to do with biology, a process which goes on more or less on its own (viable sperm, fertile egg, timing, contact, bang: the species reproduces).
BEYOND BIOLOGY
Of course biology does gives most mammalian parents an attachment to their offspring, but this is not true mothering. True human mothering requires endless choices, active participation, judgment calls, compassion without end.
In my view, there are three important points about mothering:
1. Everyone and everything needs it, and can in most cases benefit from both receiving and giving it. And…
2. You don’t have to have given birth to do it. Heck, you don’t even have to be female! And…
3. When it comes to this expanded view, why limit recognition to one day? This is the same aggravation I have about Earth Day: what, do we live on Jupiter the other 364 days of the year? Surely the vastness of what mothering brings deserves more than brunch and a bouquet of flowers once a year.
Perhaps one reason I feel this so keenly, one reason why sentimental Mother’s Day-ism makes me break out in a rash, is because I don’t participate in the other side of the equation. I never had children; I was biologically unable to do so (why? Google ‘Dalkon Shield’).
Yet: I worked as a visiting writer in the schools for decades; still do, occasionally. I have written more than 25 children’s books. I am a generous, eccentric, sort of Auntie Mame-ish “Cres-Aunt” to many of my friends’ children. When I was sixteen and living on my own, I took in a street kid named Donald, the young child of feckless hippies — a perfect example of the point that breeding-is-not-mothering — and lived with him for eight or nine months (a story told in my novel To Take a Dare).
And in the last decade of my mother’s life (which ended on November 19, 2013, when she was 98 years old and I 60) I spent increasingly large amounts of time with her, and, I believe, mothered her (an extraordinary journey, stories of which I have written both here and on Facebook).
Then there is my work as a small-scale environmentalist, my wholly inadequate but persistent attempts to make choices and act in a manner which protects and nurtures our planet, so often called Mother Earth (though, if one is going to be parental and anthropomorphic about it, I think Mother-Father Earth would be more accurate — which dittos my view on God: if He exists as such, surely He is She as much as He… but, again, I digress).
I look at all this and I sometimes think, reprising Sojourner Truth, “And ain’t I a mother?”
I am far from alone in posing this question.
BEING MOTHERED BY NON-MOTHERS
Then I think of the childless women who shaped my life and indulged me in various acts of mothering.
My Aunt Dot, glamorous, generous, proper in an eccentric fashion (I used to say she was the white sheep of the family, though as she aged she turned out to be as black as the rest of us), who not only took me to the requisite Disneyland, but to plays, ballet, and the Greek Games at Hunter College.
Aunt Dot, on the steps of her summer home in Vermont, in which I now live.
Miss Kay, the neighbor (a retired teacher) who taught me to cook and instilled a love of baking that lasts to this day; who was the first person I knew who raised a garden from which you could actually eat (corn on the cob! fresh raspberries!), and with whom I lived for a month when I was eight, while my parents went to Europe.
Virginia Carey, 76 years old to my then-18, my mentor in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with whom I drank tea in impossibly delicate Japanese china cups (“We’re going to be ladies if it kills us,” she announced to me the first time she put such a cup in front of me, reading on my face my horror that I might shatter it.)
Elsie Freund, another Arkansas mentor, a painter, jewelry designer, and peace activist, who taught me, among other things, to, “Stay fluid,” as she once forcefully directed me, when she saw me crying about her and her husband, the painter and WPA artist Louis Freund, leaving Eureka to move into assisted living.
MEN, MOTHERING
For that matter, I think of Louis, and my late father, Maurice Zolotow, and my friend George West, and my late, extraordinarily sweet husband Ned Shank.
Miller Williams
I think of the poet Miller Williams, whose generosity as a person, a writing mentor, and a writer, blessed my life in these three ways, and continues to even though he has vacated the earth.
Here is a poem of his, read aloud at his memorial:
When I Am Dead, My Dearest
Sing what you want to sing. Theologize.
Let anyone who wants to lie tell lies.
What will I care, back in the past tense
with no ambition and not a gram of sense,
back where I was before a fear and a wish
joined to form a sort of finless fish
that learned to walk and have lips and smile?
I will go there to wait an endless while,
and neither think that wrong nor wish it right,
more than a rock in darkness hopes for light.
You will say my name, but less with years,
the children less than you and more than theirs.
It’s mostly our names, as they fray and thin,
blown on the breaths of aging friends and kin,
that in some tugging moments we may seem
to sleep on a little past the dream.
I think of the present beloved Alpha Male in my life: his astounding patience, gentleness and compassion, not only to me but to his four children (all of whom are adults, two just barely) as well as the woman with whom he shared much of his life. Losing her life by degrees to a physically and cognitively degenerative disease, he cared for her with utmost scrupulous tenderness… and gave up a White House job offer, in the Bush era, to do it.
A rare moment when Tim managed to get all of his kids to sit still long enough to take a picture.
I think of Tim, the 40-ish man I met recently in a writing workshop, who works in the schools, and always wanted to be a father — so much that he adopted six, yes six, children of assorted races and ethnicities whose mothers (and fathers) didn’t want them.
And Tim adores those kids — he could hardly stop talking about them during breaks, and showed us pictures.
And that workshop had been the first time he had been away from them for an overnight in years (his partner was with them).
I think most especially and profoundly of my spiritual mentor, who would not care to have his name mentioned. (He told me once, though, when I asked how I could go through life and not acknowledge what had so fundamentally been given me, “You may say that there is … someone.”)
All biologically male, these human beings poured acts of profound nurturing on others; and in every case except Tim’s, on me.
They each mothered, and in the case of those still resident in this world, are still mothering.
REVERSING MOTHER’S DAY’S UNINTENTIONAL CRUELTY
Mother’s Day, in its insistence on biology and sentiment, is cruel to many.
Cruel to those whose mothers died young. Or those who had mothers they never knew.
Cruel to those who were lucky enough to have had mothers who were both biological and nurturing, but are now dead.
Cruel to those whose mothers were not remotely cut out for the job, those who live with this consequences of this. (My friend CJ, when she was very young, was used by her mother as bait for her mother’s pedophile boyfriends. Just before her death, CJ’s mother apologized, just once, explicitly. By then CJ was not only adult, but the faithful caregiver of this dangerous, difficult mother, a thankless job she did for years. Well, at least her mom did apologize, once. But that still leaves CJ with a lot to deal with; how could it not?).
Cruel to every woman who wants to, but is not able to, have children. Cruel to those who have had miscarriage after miscarriage, or numerous IVF attempts that failed.
Cruel to those whose mothers, or children, are in prison.
Cruel to those who came as a family to America in search of the shining beacon of possibility and freedom that had always illuminated this country, an illumination now gone dark in the insanely, irrationally punitive racism-based anti-immigrant separation policies of the present administration.
Cruel to those who spend much energy in nurturing others — mothering in the true sense — but are not biological mothers.
HOW WE HEAL
Yet by thinking of and acting on mothering in this larger sense, we ourselves nurture and heal.
- To those whose mothers are no longer in this world, we can say, “I’m sorry,” and “Remember her with me, tell me what you loved about her, and what drove you crazy.”Allow dimension in that remembering; it is so much larger than sentiment (so one-sided, so reductive).
My hands with theirs: my mother’s, my aunt’s. This picture was taken in 2007. They, and the photographer (David Koff), are gone now from this earth. I remain, for now.
2. To those whose mothers are still in this world but not remotely cut out for the job, and who live with the consequences, we can also say, “I’m sorry,” and “Remember her with me. If you recount crimes, I will not flinch or censure. Tell me what you longed for, and in what ways, if any, you were able to love each other.”
We can also step up in present time. Offer what seems to need offering: sandwich, camping trip, listening ear, open heart, fold-out couch, lesson in baking or horseback riding. Perhaps — I say this with trepidation and ambivalence, but certainty that sometimes it must be done — a call to the authorities.
3. To every woman who wants to, but is not able to, have children, to those who have had repeated miscarriages, we can say, again. “I’m sorry.” And, “Would you like to take a walk?” And, “If you want to talk, I would be honored to listen.”
Things not to say in this case:
“Have you considered adoption?” (Duh.)
“Well, then God must have other plans for you.” (And did God text you that information? Everyone who would console another person ought to keep their theology to themselves.)
Me and Mark Graff, 2014
4. To those of us who spend much of our lives and energies in what can be called mothering, but are not mothers, acknowledgement. (I must add here, that though I have been on this tear about Mother’s Day for years, and every single one of my friends and former partners knows how I feet about it, only Mark Graff, the afore-mentioned Alpha Dude, had the empathy and kindness to send me, a non-mother who does her damnedest to nurture whenever possible, to actually send me flowers on, you guessed it, Mother’s Day. In my view, in its nurturance and kindness, itself an act of mothering!)
EVERYDAY MOTHERING
I say, nix Mother’s Day. Nix the mother part. Nix the day part. Nix the consumerism, the sentimentality.
Love, and live that love, transcending biology.
Nurture, and be nurtured, every day. Exchange annual for eternal.
Compost, and nurture the earth.
Listen to, and feed, not only your children and your friends, and not only literally (with birthday cakes and soup), but strangers, figuratively (with kindness, with simply seeing them): like the tech support guy in Bangalore helping you with the installation of something or other on your laptop, to whom your kind word, acknowledging him as a fellow human being, may change if not his life than a few hours of it.
Mothering, and being mothered, in this largest sense, assures that not only will we “… in some tugging moments seem / to sleep on a little past the dream” but that, during this brief waking dream called life, we will be more fully awake.
This post, although not directly about writing, is part of Crescent Dragonwagon’s Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer blog series. It does illustrate the way that even, maybe especially, something which is difficult or makes a writer uncomfortable can be used as material, and thus not wasted.
Dragonwagon’s mother, Charlotte Zolotow, was a renowned children’s book writer and editor. CD now serves as her literary executor, an experience she has written about here. Below, a Crescent-and-Charlotte food-celebrating picture.
Crescent and Charlotte, in the restaurant at Dairy Hollow (a country inn CD once owned). This was taken in the early to mid-90’s.
Lastly, one more illustration relevant to mothering: a collage piece entitled “Struggle Mother”, by the artist Hawa Diallo, who began developing her artistic gift while she was a caregiver to Zolotow. To read about the relationship that developed between Hawa, Charlotte, and Crescent, click here to read an article which appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine. The story shows clearly how love, and mothering, transcend biology; these three women, in different ways, mothered each other.
This post captures such important sentiments. Personally Mother’s Day is dreadful and filled with a conflicted mix of joy, guilt, pain and resentment.
Your words have inspired a shift in my mindset. This year, I’m purposefully choosing to love and live that love.
Appreciate you!
Anisha
Thank you, Anisha. I am honored to have assisted in a shift you were clearly ready to make. Look at us, mothering each other! xo
Marvelous! well said well said! With words that open me to the hope and comfort of realization how well you understand so much! Why is it hopeful? Because hope springs from wisdom, and your wisdom is a fresh water spring, sprung from the soggy earth over the rocks ‘n moss.
This is the first taste I have had of your writing, and for whatever reason the first time its come to my inbox. Thank you.
Thank you so very much, Emily. I am glad you found hope in this… xo
This is my first Mothers Day without my mom, and I have been experiencing many of these emotions that you have described and defined so eloquently. She was a mom, sister, friend, teacher, optimist. It has helped to write. As a Buddhist, it helps to think of all the kind mothers in the world, not just my own but all those others who have nurtured and guided me, prayed over me, loved me. We all need a little mothering from time to time; how lucky are we to have those people in our lives who can provide it. Thank you so much for this essay.
Thank you. We had a minister once that talked about mothers and mothering, so much nicer than the Sunday I sat in church and Mothers were asked to come up and get a flower.
Mothers Day hurt more after my own mother died, but it hurt more when I realized I wasn’t a mother, not my choice, and would never be a grandmother. I am a loved aunt and great aunt, so it makes up for it, a bit!
Right there with you, Nancy!
To be un-mothered is so cruel, especially at this time of year. And, being un-fathered usually comes with being un-mothered. Those types find each other but don’t use contraception and they leave broken children who have no idea what being part of family is like. Then they discover that people from real families cut you out because you are so obviously un-socialized never having been apart of a family, Don’t have children that you can’t take care of physically, emotionally or educationally. No social service organization will clean up your mess.
Sad and terrible and true. And getting truer every minute, as access to sex education, birth control and yes, abortion (like Bill Clinton, I believe it should be “safe, legal and rare”) dries up. I don’t understand our world and our failures to… well, you know, I think. Heartbreaking, on a daily basis.
So true
Crescent,
My mother introduced me to you via a well loved cookbook of yours. Many days we spent with our heads bent over the thick pages of your book, cooking, laughing, spilling coffee on the pages. Thank you for another link in the long chain of links to my mama.
This is the sixth Mother’s Day without my parter in crime (my mama)
Your words are so vulnerable and you share your heart and wisdom freely with us. Thank you.
All love
Hanne
I am so honored to have been part of the connection between you and your mama, Hanne! Thank you…
Crescent. Yes to living a life of love! Enjoyed your words.
Thank you for this post. It is affirming and contains much to consider as I prepare for the yearly, “You DON’T’?” and whatever followup remarks people tack on the end of that. This has slowed down a bit, since my peers are now grandparents. I’ve left the age when I might have had children give me a handmade gift with painted macaroni on it or a messy home cooked breakfast brought lovingly to me. I’m now 50, beyond the age when anyone would “helpfully” volunteer that they know a good fertility doctor. Now I’m the age of someone’s Nana or Gran.
You are so right that many others who are not technically mothers contribute to nurturing and guiding, comforting and caring. I’m grateful to many, some of whom are not my mother, for taking care of me and loving me in the many ways they have. They all deserve to be appreciated and celebrated.
Since adulthood, I have been uncomfortable with Mother’s Day sentimentality for the difficulty I had with my mother. Two weeks I lost my son in a car crash and Mother’s Day is just another reminder that I will never mother him again.
Oh, Pam. I am so, so, so sorry. Embracing you from afar.
Thank you.
Crescent asked me to share my Mother’s Day (2019) post here so others can see it:
A friend of a friend just commented that she is staying off Facebook for a couple days because of Mother’s Day. I get that. I always wanted and expected to have children. I didn’t. When I turned 37, I realized when my mom had the same birthday, she was pregnant with me. My biological clock really went off. I even considered adopting. But I decided I did not want to parent alone (I might have made a different decision if I hadn’t been crippled a couple years before). I have asked my husband what the cats are getting me this year. One year he actually did give me a Mother’s Day card that was from my cats. I really loved that.
When I was a church goer, it hurt when the mothers in the congregation got some form of acknowledgment.
Since I experience pain because I never had children, I believe the pain of women who had a child and lost them has to be much greater.
So please, if you know a woman who doesn’t have children, be compassionate to them on Mother’s Day. For some it may have been a choice. But for many it wasn’t.