Motherless Mother’s Day, Again

Last year, at the get-together after the memorial service for poet Miller Williams, his daughter, singer/songwriter/musician Lucinda Williams, said to me, “You know what’s strange? You know when I cried? I cried the day my father told me he was through writing poetry. That he could no longer do it. So far I haven’t cried at all since his actual death, but I cried that day.”

I said, “Doesn’t seem strange to me. The day my mother’s caregivers told me she could no longer eat solid food, that they had to purée everything, I went upstairs and cried on and off for hours. Mind you, she didn’t have a problem with it! She didn’t even know she wasn’t getting solid food anymore. She liked the purées, and they were easier for her to swallow. But, all those meals we’d eaten together…”

Lucinda nodded. We were by a table of hors d’oeuvres. I took a piece of broccolini, she spread some goat cheese on a cracker. Who knew how long we would be able to write songs, or poems, or eat broccolini? Neither of us, certainly. But that there would be an end point was clear.

Loss.  The nature of life is, you seem to get given things — not just objects but people, and not just people but feelings for them, such as love and ambivalence — but in fact these are not gifts. Our lives and the lives of everyone and everything we love are loans, not permanent endowments. No telling when these’ll be called in, or how.

I’ve lost some people I love suddenly – to accident, to suicide, to unlooked-for out-of-the-blue cardiac arrest.

And I’ve lost other people I love gradually: to old age and decline, a predictable cessation (though never predictable as to the precise timing).

As the one left behind (for now, so far, at least), I can tell you this: gradual is easier for that person, or has been for me. Tears are spread out over time. The process feels natural, more comprehensible. You have time to get used to it, sort of. The grief is anticipatory, 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. Though, as everyone will tell you, “It’s never easy.”

And I can tell you this. Everyone who doesn’t die young will someday have a motherless Mother’s Day.

Mothering … Days

If, that is, 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) grew you in her own body. That mother, like all of us, arrives, is here for awhile, and leaves.

This is my third 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 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 thoroughly forgiven but used, utilized. It has become an inextricable part of what and who I am, and I now view the once-tough parts of our loving with as much gratitude as the tender portions.

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 baby squirrels. I can’t enshrine an act of biology in itself as having automatic meaning and love. Only some of those — 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 son who is a mean-spirited house-painter more than the gentle attorney.

I think meaning and love come, if they do, not with the act of giving birth, but with  the acts, plural and endless, of mothering. Of nurturing and nourishing, protecting, encouraging, growing, loving, introducing, educating, listening, of being present as long and in as many dimensions as possible. Of, too, 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).

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

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, which, however well meant and well-received, is perfunctory.

Perhaps one reason I feel this so keenly, one reason sentimental Mother’s Dayism makes me break out in a rash, is because I cannot participate in the other side of the equation. I did not have children; I was biologically unable (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 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 I digress).

I look at all this and I sometimes think, reprising Sojourner Truth, “And ain’t I a mother?”

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

Aunt Dot, on the steps of her summer home in Vermont, in which I now live.

she was the white sheep of the family) who not only took me to the requisite Disneyland, but to plays, ballet, and the Greek Games at Hunter College.

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 when my parents went off to Europe for a month.

Virginia Carey, 76 years old to my 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 said cup.)

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 Miller Williams, whose generosity as a person, a writing mentor, and a poet, 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 (two of whom are adults, the other two almost) 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 tenderness.

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 me. They have, each in their own way, mothered me.

Cruelty; its reversal

Mother’s Day, in its insistence on biology and sentiment, is cruel to many.

Cruel to those who were lucky enough to have mothers who were both biological and nurturing, but are now dead.

Cruel to those whose mothers were not remotely cut out for the job, and 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 CJ 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 spend much energy in nurturing others — mothering, I believe, 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) every time.

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.

To those whose mothers were not remotely cut out for the job, and 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.”

To those whose mothers are not remotely cut out for the job, in present time, we step up. 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.

To every woman who wants to, but is not able to, have children, “I’m sorry.” And, “I’m listening.” Not “Have you considered adoption?” (Duh.) Not “Well, then God must not have meant for you to have children.” (And did God text you that information?)

To those of us who spend much of our lives and energies in what can be called mothering, but are not mothers, acknowledgement.

every-day mothering

I say, nix Mother’s Day. Nix the mother part. Nix the day part.

Love, and live that love, transcending biology.

Nurture, and be nurtured, every day. Exchange diurnal 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.