BY MICHELE MILLER
What’s What New Port Richey
May 2022
I don’t always have it in me to pen new thoughts on the Mother’s Day holiday so I’m bringing this one out of the archives.
Mother’s Day, like a lot of holidays, is a mixed bag for me.
One “half-empty” notion supported by its creator, Anna Jarvis, is that Mother’s Day is simply an opportunistic holiday that’s all about selling overpriced greeting cards and flowers.
It is a day fraught with cynicism and celebration. A blending of bittersweet that separates the haves and have-nots, and amplifies losses or hurts doled out in uneven measure, depending on how you’ve bookmarked life’s familial journey.
So it’s no wonder that later in life, Anna Jarvis worked hard to have the holiday she helped create in loving tribute to her own mother banished from the American calendar.
When I was a kid, Mother’s Day Sunday was a big deal at the Episcopal church I attended on Massachusetts’ south shore. Buckets of pink carnations would be lined up on the church steps to greet the ladies – a badge of honor handed out by male ushers to all the mothers. The barren and elderly spinsters were included, of course, an awkward aside in the special blessing made over those being lifted for carrying the human race forward.
My mother lined her brood of five in the front pew each week in hopes of saving our souls or at least turning us into acceptable human beings. We often made mischief behind her back nonetheless and rewarded her on Mother’s Day Sunday with school-made gifts and cards.
Mom treasured them I know, because she kept a few, including a poetic, construction paper greeting card that was artfully decorated by my elder sister with a heart-shaped paper doily and a stick figure donning what appeared to be a head of very messy hair.
Dear Mom.
It doesn’t matter how you cook.
All that matters is how you look.
Please try to look better.
Happy Mother’s Day.
In retrospect, it’s likely mom was a little frazzled back then. Five kids and all.
To be sure, as we got older the gifts got more elaborate. Flowers, scented candles, rose milk hand cream, champagne brunches and properly worded store-bought cards she didn’t keep.
I was 26 and ambling through the early stages of motherhood with two toddlers when my mother died at the age of 53 from glioblastoma brain cancer. It was May 10, 1985 – just a few days before Mother’s Day. It had been a horrendous year since her diagnosis. We made our peace. Shed tears and said our words in ways that lend to healing and forgiveness. Even so, the family she was the matriarch of was imploding. There was little she could do but leave.
At the time it felt like life was just piling on. The timing of her death added insult to injury.
Bookmarked.
Then a kind soul who had been witness to the heartache of my mother’s deterioration offered a different perspective and better clarity.
“What a gift your mom gave you – leaving when she did,” she said. “How fortunate you are not going to have to spend Mother’s Day watching her suffer in the hospital.”
Right then I was able to see a final nurturing act of love with my mother’s timely passing. Another gift. Bookmarked.
That kind soul – my husband’s older sister – stepped into the role of a surrogate. With her supportive and gentle nature, she helped fill a hollowed-out hole left by my mother’s absence. When I needed child-rearing advice, she was there. Often her words echoed my mother’s “count your blessings” sage advice. But she also offered up “You can do this!” sentiments that had been far and few between.
Diane Manning. Bookmarked.
A few years later we would lose her to cancer, too, but not before she helped carry my husband and me through the care and eventual loss of our eldest daughter to leukemia at the tender age of five.
As I said, Mother’s Day is a mixed bag for me.
I have suffered great loss, as many have, and survived. I am blessed to have brought four children into this world and to be a grandmother of two, lovely granddaughters who rock that world. As with my own mother, there are things I got right, and things I meant to get right, but didn’t. And there have been things I simply got wrong.
Bookmarked.
Now, at the ripe age of 62, I know that hindsight can be a cruel or kind master depending on the taken vantage.
And that, I suppose, is why today I celebrate the nurturers. People who step in to care when they don’t have to. People who have no familial genes in the game but get it right when others don’t – or can’t. People who become a better part of your upbringing in that whole, “takes a village” kind of way.
Among them are the late moms of two childhood friends who provided a safe haven in their homes in my younger years, offering a place to sleep over and get away to when dysfunction was running rampant at home.
Mrs. Gillan and Mrs. McCue. Bookmarked.
The kindergarten teacher at the YMCA who invited me into her classroom to help out during my junior high years. She showed by example invaluable lessons of dealing with young children – sometimes in a sing-song voice I can still hear in my heart. Probably kept me out of trouble, too.
Mrs. Flynn. Bookmarked.
The pen pal aunts who took the time to write to me when I was a kid, connecting me with family in far-away places like California, Puerto Rico, and Florida while likely helping hone my writing skills.
Aunt Louise. Aunt Joanne. Aunt Nancy. Bookmarked.
The high school English teacher who held a high standard and saw something in me no one else did. She encouraged me to keep writing. Her words of encouragement struck me and stuck with me, and here I am.
Mrs. Meredith Atkinson. Bookmarked.
The dear friend and priest who swaddled us in our grief and helped nurture our faith after the loss of our daughter, Danielle. She offered love and support, reaching into her pocket to help us make the move to Florida when we needed to start over someplace else.
Reverend Victoria Wells-Hunt. Bookmarked.
My mother’s sister who stepped into a grandmotherly role, sending Christmas gifts and postcards for the kids, and penning scores of letters to me as a way to keep me apprised of the happenings in my mother’s family after we moved south. She passed away in the spring of 2020 from COVID-19, but we lost her years earlier due to Alzheimer’s disease.
In the end, she left a loving legacy in her letters that I’ve been able to reflect on. A tangible record of the care she fostered for her family and mine.
Aunt Phyllis. Bookmarked.
So here’s a nod to them all and a Happy Mother’s Day to the rest of the nurturers out there.
Thanks for stepping in and mixing it up. It means a lot.
Now onward.
Related
Anna Jarvis: The woman who regretted creating Mother’s Day, BBC News
Reflections on Mother’s Day
Don’t feel too Bad – kid’s Know how to cash in, By Michele Miller, Tampa Bay Times
