Okay, so I got a little off the subject in my last blog about Mother's Day. I wrote about my mother, then quoted from material I published about my mother, then wrote about two typologies of mother's ("The Madwoman Mother" and the Too-Nice Mother," then wrote a little bit about Anne Sexton, then went into the history of my first days with my son, then ended with a giant splash of generosity and welcoming feelings towards not only my mother but all the mothers I know and love the best.
Or, uh, maybe you read it.
But really - - really -- what I wanted to say (before I said what I did say) - - was this: mother's are people.
That's it.
Which doesn't come as a giant surprise to anyone, I know, but it feels good just to say it, so let's all just sit back, breathe, plop a big smile on our faces and say it out loud: "MOTHER'S ARE PEOPLE!"
YEAH!!!
Isn't that good? Isn't that great? And isn't that true?
Mothers are people who were once little girls and who played dolls or who climbed trees and who ran and laughed and picked their noses when nobody was looking and dreamed and farted and sang along with cds or the radio and wondered about all kinds of things like where babies came from and looked at their Dads and their Moms and thought 'No way' and ate as much candy and cake as they could get away with and loved cereal and hated vegetables or loved vegetables (unlikely) and hated cereal and liked or loved certain relatives and disliked other certain relatives and grew up into junior high and got crushes on girls or got crushes on boys and started worrying about when they'd get their breasts and when they'd fit into their bras and how to deal with periods and how god, how horrifyingly embarrassing THAT would be and suddenly they GOT breasts and they GOT periods and oh god it WAS embarrassing, it WAS scary and somebody helped them with all of this or nobody helped them with any of this or somebody only helped them with it part way and they learned the rest of it from friends, duh, or books, worse, and they went on to senior high and they started dating and that got really scary because they had to go to classes and sit there and stare at the teachers and do at least a modicum of schoolwork while a whole different part of their brains were thinking about Randy or Fred or Johnny the star football player and whether or not to ask them to the Tolo or how to learn to flirt or how to get their Moms to let them shave their legs or how to get their Moms and Dads to let them go on dates and what do they DO on a date if they get one and oh my god it's all so complicated and what about popularity, are they popular enough, and how do they get popular if they're not and how do they get breasts if they don't have any and then they graduated from high school and they either had sex or they didn't have sex and, according to statistics, if they had sex it wasn't very goood because nobody's first time is very good, especially if it was the boy's first time too, so they had to go through that hurdle and figure out what to say about it, do you tell, do you not tell and what do you do if HE tells, and then there's all the pregnancy fears, especially in my day, which, believe you me, was about one million-billion days away from today but even so, this is how it goes, or a variation on this, and the girl grows up but she always carries the "child part" inside of her, she always secretly (or openly) wants her candy as well as her vegies (if she really does ever like vegies), and she's only pretending to be grown-up until the day (if it really does come) when she truly feels grown up (and that could be a long, long way off) and she sometimes dreams about just shucking it and running away, because guess what, Teens, you're not the only ones who want to run away, so do your Moms.
Lots of times.
Yesterday I was sitting with a 48 year old woman, a beautiful, highly accomplished woman, a successful mother of three, and she said, "I was thinking that maybe I should have sent my kids a Mother's Day card that said, 'Sorry for the way I turned out'..." and then she looked at me and smiled, so I smiled....and then she gave a small laugh, so I gave a tiny laugh.....and then we both threw out heads back and enjoyed a nice long laugh. Because we knew. We knew we we both mothers and we knew that motherhood is can be so damn life-defining and we knew that inside her funny little joke we both felt a small flash of liberation.
"Sorry, kids, for the way
your Mother has turned out.
Guess what. Totally
human, after all.
Love,
Mom."
HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY
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