I wrote this piece 15 years ago, before my daughter’s wedding, before the birth of my two grandsons, before many things, some good, some less so, but …I love it. I hope you do too.
OK! I used to sing in the car when I ferried my daughter and her friends around. The youthful embarrassment was palpable. Was I crazy? I am sure that my daughter thought so. There is more: I made her come home from dates earlier than she wanted. I actually threw one young man off our front porch. I didn’t physically remove him, but rather used my well-practiced teacher inflection to tell him to leave. Poor thing had the added burden of a mother who taught in her school. I am sure that I have amassed a laundry list of faux pas in her eyes. How do I know? I have my own list of humiliations that I felt as a girl negotiating a workable relationship with my own mother.
My daughter has invited me to tea at the White Dove next Saturday to celebrate Mother’s Day. I have rearranged my week so that I can go with her. It means more than she knows now and, hopefully, will come to know some day herself when she is a mother. We, like many mothers and daughters, are constantly negotiating our status. She is no longer the adoring child who would not sit and watch TV unless I had my arm around her. She is no longer the teenager, wary of my degrading behaviors and strict rules. She is no longer the college student, calling with a question about navigating the shoals of academic politics, nor is she the bride-to-be, determined to orchestrate her wedding without interference.
I, on the other hand, am no longer the young … well scratch that term, since she was born when I was 39 … I am no longer the 40-something mother of a young child, nor the 50-something mother of a teen, but a mid-60s mother of a newlywed who wants more than anything to pass on what I only learned myself a relatively few years ago.
And it goes back to my own obliviousness of the who of my mother. My mother wanted only the best for me, but she wasn’t sure of what that was. A woman who always worked, who was taken out of school at an early age to help support her family, could not conceive of a female aspiring to something more than a “good job in case a husband fell on hard times.” Hard times were ours for most of my youth, from the time my Dad was diagnosed with TB, heart trouble and emphysema to his untimely death in his mid-50s. It was, in fact, my Mom who supported the family by working as a night shift telephone operator. She worked hard and depended on me as the eldest to help. She used her own hard time growing up as a yardstick to measure the value of the environment of her children’s lives. There were no opportunities to play a musical instrument or be a cheerleader, or participate in school plays for her, and so, when those things were available to me, she was wary … and that part was not fun. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. We lived in different times.
My going away to college was frightening for her. She didn’t finish grade school. I guess that, somehow, she knew this was a good thing for me. She sent me five dollars every week during my freshman year until I could find a part-time job. I thought I needed spending money. Five dollars was a lot of money for our family. I, full of my ego and full scholarship, thought I deserved it.
Through the years, we negotiated, never quite letting go of the power struggle between holding on and letting go, until she was quite old and infirm. On the night before the surgery that was to take her life, we spoke and she, who had been in demonstrably failing health, had transformed into someone that I hardly recognized. “I don’t want to be this sick anymore,” she said, with a strong, youthful voice. “If I don’t make it, I’ll never know.” I told her that I would talk with her tomorrow. That talk never took place. She spoke to me in another way.
As I cleaned out her closets and the dresser, I found her things … the paraphernalia of someone like me … clothes that she loved and those that she didn’t. Pictures of friends and family, photographs of my parents when they were young, a snapshot of my mother in her girl scout uniform, a photo of her own, much loved grandmother, my great-grandmother, scraps of drawings from our childhood, her romance novels, clothing that she had begun to sew for Christmas gifts for us … and it became clear. My mother was a person, not a saint, not someone with extraordinary powers, but someone who was a real woman with the same wants and hopes for happiness that I had and have. She had four children that she took care of the best way she knew how, with every resource at her command. Because her mother put her first, she did the same for us … but first has different meanings as times and circumstances change. What I learned was that the love behind it doesn’t.
And so, on the day before Mother’s Day when my daughter and I take tea, I want to give her the gift of knowing that I did the best I could with what I knew and what I had. I am me. Uniquely me, the child of Phyllis Enid Toms Smithwick, I gave her what I could – my time, my energy, my substance, my love. I am far from perfect. I have my peccadilloes, my weaknesses and, yes, strengths. I am not a transparent cutout of a fictional character called mother. I am three dimensional, with all of the parts of being human fully operating, every day.
And I do recognize that singing in the car is probably one of the worst things any parent can do…but I still would have sung in the car. I was giving her me.
