Unmothered, on Mother's Day - Democratic Underground

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Unmothered, on Mother's Day

Unmothered, on Mother's Day

Remembering my mother on the holiday she hated.

By Meghan O'Rourke Posted Thursday, May 6, 2010, at 9:41 AM ET

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card. So we never observed it when I was growing up. She would much rather have had our company for the first Saturday in May—she loved horse racing, and Derby Day most of all—than at an obligatory brunch at an overcrowded restaurant eight days later. When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 things changed a little, for me at least. Suddenly Mother's Day had some meaning. It became an inscribed moment to try to hold on to what was slipping away before my eyes: namely, having a mother.

This Mother's Day is the second since she died, on Christmas Day, 2008 (I wrote about her death and my grief in Slate), but last year I was too dazed to notice much. Now, for the first time, the endless mentions of the holiday everywhere ("Make your Mother's Day reservations now!") have forced me to take stock, whether I want to or not. Where will I be on Sunday? Where am I now? I wonder. Mainly, I feel that while my grief has lessened—dramatically—my sense of being motherless has intensified. I hadn't anticipated this. The first grips of grief were so terrible that I couldn't wait to get beyond them, to a state I hoped might be "better." But as each new day arrives I find myself, though suffering less acutely, more unmothered. Strange. And: not part of the contract!

Yahoo! Buzz FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSEPeople with mothers can't really know what this is like, and I have new empathy for friends who lost their mothers when they were young. I was 32, but even at this age, it hardly feels minor to lose one's model at a juncture when I still have so many questions: whether and when to have children, what to do about my mild allergy to the institution of marriage, what a life's work should truly be. My mother was about my age when she was promoted from schoolteacher to administrator, becoming head of the middle school at Saint Ann's, where I was then entering the seventh grade. I remember how nervous she was speaking in public the first time, at a meeting the day before school started. She fretted all that morning, dressing. I agonized with her, because I was deeply shy, and such a task seemed heart-freezingly terrifying. Afterward I asked her how it went. She said, "You know, you just have to do it. You don't have a choice. And then once you've done it, you can do it again, and it isn't so bad."

This was her pragmatic approach to life—not idealized, not perfectionistic, but intensely present. If you could be present, the rest would work itself out. Now, of course, she's not present, and yet I have to figure out how I can be. One thing that helps is summoning up her words and her jokes—even her little rebukes; I might get irritated by something trivial, and then I catch myself saying (often out loud) the very refrain of hers that used to so irritate me: "Lighten up, Meg." In fact, as the grief passed, I began to feel my mother inside me—usually on holidays or in groups. I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit. But lately there are these moments when it's as if her spirit enters and inhabits me; it's palpable, like being possessed. The word inspiration comes from the Latin words for "in" and "breath" (spirare, which also gives us our word for "spirit"). Maybe I've breathed my mother in.

More: http://www.slate.com/id/2253115