Mother's Day Gift

Mother’s Day here on the Point was celebrated with a tea at the Community Center which was sponsored by the Senior Center Group. They did it last year, too, as I recall, and it was well attended and so repeated this year. I was over at the library when the organizers brought in a raft of beautiful flower centerpieces. Of course, that’s the beauty of Mother’s Day; i.e., the date. It comes with the best flowers of the year. Ironically, the organizers of the tea were, for the most part, mothers old enough that they're likely to be without mothers of their own. Maybe their purpose in organizing the tea was to ensure that their children would have someplace reasonable to take them.

In any case, it’s a truly strange holiday, I think. I have passed way beyond any need to think about it or celebrate it. My own mother has been dead for almost a decade, and even when she was alive, there wasn’t much ado about it for her; not at least once we had all left home. A phone call, perhaps. My own three children usually call or write on Mother’s Day, but we all call or write each other frequently, so it does tend to feel like a ceremonial or symbolic event where, instead of the customary conversation, we talk at great length about the weather in order to make it feel different.

On the other hand, when my kids were little, Mother’s Day had a goofy kind of charm, as the kids made cards or cooked breakfast or wrote a poem: did something, provided a kind of gift--if not the kind that Hallmark was planning for--that rose above the daily-ness of our lives. And, of course, that’s what ends up being the problem of rising income in a society that is very insistent upon the need to give gifts for a great variety of occasions. How do you manage to give someone something they want when, if they wanted it, they would already have just gone out and bought it? They already have what they want. That’s the pleasure of being solidly middle class. Oh, there’s always a month in Tahiti or a 6 karat diamond or something that someone might vaguely long for but doesn’t expect ever to get, and you are not likely to be buying it for them on Mother’s Day in any case.

So, I’m grateful that we’ve gone past the presents and if they lived here, I think I’d have been spared going out for tea (although perhaps not for dinner). When they were little, they’d always say, ‘When are we going to have Kids’ Day?’, and I would routinely reply, ‘Well, every day is kids’ day!” And they would groan. But I would now have to tell them that actually, every day is mother’s day. Every day I think about them out there in the bigger world that I am now far away from; wonder what they are doing and thinking, imagine their lives from the inside by thinking about my own life when I was their age. They are the novel I am always reading, always thinking about, always wondering how it will all come out. Not to mention that they are the three most interesting people I’ve ever known. Known them all their lives, and they’re still in large part a mystery to me. As it should be. That’s a Mother’s Day gift I am happy to have.