Mothers and other conveniences

WHEN I was growing up, we didn’t do a lot about Mother’s Day. It wasn’t such a big deal as it is now, at least not in my family. I suppose we kids crayoned cards and served the odd clumsy breakfast in bed. My own mum certainly invited her mother and her mother-in-law for dinner, which she cooked, and probably cleaned up after, too.

I remember being startled as a teenager when I visited my aunt and her family in California in May and saw what a big deal Mother’s Day was down there. They were not a showy family in general, but there were presents, and tributes, and dinner at a restaurant. I suddenly realized that since my mother was pretty great, too, I ought to have been making more of an effort.

As an adult, I did. More importantly, though, I got to know, and love, my mum as a person, as someone who had an interior life that wasn’t defined by her children. She, like all mothers, had talents and interests that she was perfectly happy not to share with us. If we were curious, fine, but if not, that was fine, too.

What a surprise it is to realize that your parents are individuals, whose own youths delineated their characters. Mum’s father, who was really too old and too necessary to his four children to have volunteered for World War II, had been killed at Dieppe. Just for starters, that was a fundamental difference between how she grew up and how I did. Later on, as my mother read the letters her parents had sent each other during the war, she shared her observations on their relationship with me.

This is the gift we get when our parents’ lives are not cut short, the great privilege of getting to know them in three dimensions. It allows us to see one another as equals. Mother’s role no longer focuses on bossing us around or trying to correct our inadequacies, although there are plenty who can’t stop themselves, no matter how old their kids. Our parents have wisdom to offer us, sure, but even better, they can give us the wonderful, comfortable pleasure of their company.

It’s my mum as a friend whom I will miss this Mother’s Day -- my first without her -- not my mother as “icon.” I didn’t have the child-obsessed, ultra-involved parents who seem to be the modern ideal. My mum didn’t spend my childhood crouching down to “bond” or play with me – the assumption was that kids were meant to play with other kids.

We had the typical mother-daughter battles when I was a teen. Then I grew up and started recognizing that Mum was smart, well-read, curious, artistic, beautiful, stylish, prickly and a unique mixture of sensitive and tough. She had many bad breaks in terms of her and my father’s health, especially in her later years, but I almost never saw her cry. She was critical, but fiercely loyal. Like my dad, who had been a social worker, she had a deep sense of right and wrong, though the two of them didn’t always concur on what that was.

What I miss most about my mother is her sense of humour -- her wit and her playfulness. For me, her naughty twinkle was a magnet, and as an adult, I usually responded in kind. Nobody really “gets you” like your mother. If you’re really lucky, you can eventually return the favour.

My husband Stanley didn’t have that chance. His mum died suddenly, as a result of an aneurysm, shortly after he returned home from university. He feels he never got to honour her the way she deserved, with his full attention and an appreciation of who she really was.

One of his fondest memories of her is of a moment when she stood up to him. She was a tiny woman, gentle and soft-spoken, with a wonderfully kind heart – her sons were being funny whenever they called her “Sarge.” But when Stanley announced that he wasn’t going to return from his Calgary summer job to Ottawa to complete his final year of university because he didn’t want to leave his girlfriend (moi), Vera laid down the law. She was, obviously, right. She was probably right a lot. Stanley wishes he could have told her so.

Of course, the thing about parents, including Stanley’s and mine, is that they don’t just offer us role models to ape. They also tip us off to ways we don’t want to be like them. (Likewise, parents see their own good and bad qualities reflected in their kids, which makes for some uncomfortable opportunities for morbid self-examination.) We are formed as much by our reaction against certain qualities in our parents as we are by our affinities with them. It’s hard not to feel hurt or offended as you watch your children differentiating themselves from you and your spouse. The aspects of you that they reject may well be the things you wouldn’t mind getting rid of, too.

But really, how much choice is involved in all this? Do any of us remember making the decision to be flighty, or sociable, or testy, or calm? Who can we blame for the things we don’t like in ourselves, unless we’re prepared to be blamed by our children for things they may someday see as shortcomings in their own personalities? It’s a complicated dance, this one between parents and kids. Toes get stepped on. Not everybody likes the polka.

Nevertheless, Mother’s Day is now such big business in the U.S. that it apparently prompts sales of some $14.6 billion. This Sunday, lots of people will be paying tribute to their mothers with flowers and chocolates and brunches out. Some kids may even do the totally ludicrous, presenting Ma with a gift certificate from a company called Excitations, which offers experience-based gifts like “swimming with sharks” and “race-car driving lessons.”

Many of us, however, will be thinking fondly of mothers who are gone. Chances are, we won’t feel guilty if we didn’t splurge on a lavish gift for our last Mother’s Day together. But we may well wish we’d spent more time getting to know the principal woman in our lives, figuring out what really made her tick.

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