My Mother's Day Problem

Actually, I don't have a problem with Mother's Day itself. It's a lovely holiday, a little Hallmarky, perhaps, but it was invented in 1908 by Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia in honor of her mother, while the Hallmark card company wasn't founded until 1910. Jarvis lobbied to make it an official national holiday and achieved this goal by 1914. Later, she became so disgusted with the commercialization of the holiday, especially the widespread purchasing of preprinted greeting cards, that she was arrested for disturbing the peace while leading a protest against Mother's Day in 1948. She died within the year. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Yet, as I said, a lovely holiday. I went out to brunch with my children today (the only day a year I eat brunch), and then took my daughter to see a delightful production of Stargirl, a play adapted by Y York from a young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli (There was no mother onstage, but evidence of a supportive, loving mother in the title character's backstory). My daughter gave me a homemade card and a little book she wrote on why I am a wonderful mother (despite my frequent bouts of yelling, which she also cited). My son gave me a hug and a kiss (this, from an undemonstrative teenage boy, is riches indeed). All in all, a splendid day.

Medea and child

No, what I have a problem with is the assumption that all mothers are equally worth celebrating, all equally wonderful, nurturing, and just plain maternal. They aren't. Just go to the tabloids to get examples of many horrendous mothers. Horrible mothers have existed down through the ages: think Medea, think Lady Capulet, think Hansel and Gretel's mother (yes, it was their mother, not their stepmother. Look at the original 1812 version of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmaerchen--she wasn't changed to their stepmother until the 1819 version), think Joan Crawford. Ugh, no, don't think Joan Crawford. There were and are plenty of terrible mothers in the world. But, as this is my blog, I think I should reveal that I'm specifically talking about my own mother.

Joan Crawford and children

My mother grew up in Japan during the beginning of the Showa Period. She was one of five siblings in a close-knit family. Her mother, my Obaa-san, was affectionate and warm, as far as I could tell from the few times I met her and from seeing her interactions with her other children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. I never knew from whence my mother's coldness and fury flowed, but what was certain was that she was almost never happy, almost always disappointed, enraged, or despondent. True, her adolescence was ruined by World War II, the Bomb, and the death of her beloved elder brother. Her career as a physicist never took off, and her subsequent career as a pioneering computer programmer never made her happy or fulfilled. My brother and I didn't turn out to be the children she wanted to have: brilliant, accomplished, celebrated. I believe she thought, like Leopold Mozart, that she could bully and berate us into becoming prodigies or geniuses. She was a Tiger Mother before the term existed.

My mother's own life hadn't turned out the way she wanted it to, which probably added to the hopes she placed on us, and thus to the sense of defeat she felt when she saw what we became. Not that we're criminals or layabouts or drug addicts or embezzlers: we're just slightly offbeat adults with somewhat dull lives. Seeing us must have been a harsh reminder of her failure, because she kept us at arm's length after we left home. In the last ten years or so of her life, before dementia hit, she tried to keep me and my brother away, with ever more far-fetched excuses. Not counting our visits to her deathbed, we each visited her precisely once after the births of our children. She was not interested in getting to know her grandchildren, or even in learning about their lives. We sent her packets of photographs of them, only to find them unopened in boxes after she died.

After she died, now over seven years ago, I found it easy to mourn the loss of a mother, but hard to mourn her specifically. Well-meaning people would come up to me and say, "Oh, losing your mother is the hardest thing in the world!" and I would nod politely and thank them for their kind thoughts while feeling like a fraud. Then came the time every year during the High Holy Days (yes, I'm Jewish--it's complicated) when I had to say a prayer for my mother during Yizkor services. For years, the prayer would stick in my throat. I did not want to follow my mother's example, or to say that I respected her, or to hope that her immortal soul would reside anywhere pleasant. So I was happy to find that the new edition of the High Holy Days machzor that we switched to a couple of years ago contained the following prayer:

Dear God, You know my heart. 

Indeed, You know me better than I know myself, so I turn to You before I rise for Kaddish. 

My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. 

I do not want to pretend to love, or to grief that I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child.

Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. 

I pray that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place. 

—Robert Saks

This little prayer, printed in the margin of the page for memorializing a mother during the Yizkor service, made such a huge difference to me. It was as though a crushing weight had been lifted from my chest, and I could breathe freely again. It made me understand, truly understand, that there was not a one-size-fits-all mold for motherhood, that it was all right to feel angry, hurt, betrayed by the mother who had not known how to love her children.

I continue to celebrate Mother's Day, now with my own children. I love them deeply as they are, and would not wish them to be otherwise. I practice a style of motherhood I call "Reactive Parenting": whenever I am confronted with a problem involving discipline or childrearing, I ponder carefully what my mother would have done in the same situation and do exactly the opposite. It's not failsafe, but it seems to work ninety percent of the time.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!