This is not a happy post so please be warned and don't read it if you expect a traditional Mother's Day tribute.
As is her habit Sue flew out to St. Louis yesterday to see her Mom and siblings on Mother's Day. I am a bachelor for four days, which is about all I can take. I can't figure out who will be happier when she returns, me or the cats. Since Sue is the glue that holds things together around here she is missed as soon as I can't find any of a thousand things that I think "go missing." They aren't missing, of course. They are just filed away in some code that I can't break. Its a man thing.
She loves to see her Mom and her sisters and she has a good time every time she goes. And I am very glad that she does it because she would have far less fun if she stayed here.
You see, Sue and I don't have any children together. She can't and I already had three grown children when we married. So the cats are our "kids." That works out well for us, but is not everybody's cup of tea. I always figure that Sue deserves some special attention at Mother's Day and so I am really happy that she spends it with her mother.
I also have been pleased when she has picked an older friend to be her companion at the "Mother-Daughter" banquets at church. Usually she picks someone who did not have any children or whose children are older, far away or estranged. She did it for them, not for herself. She doesn't think about herself on Mother's Day.
Now that the church no longer calls the annual Mother's Day banquet the "Mother-Daughter' banquet she thinks that changing the name was unnecessary because she just made the event work for her and her invited "surrogate mother." But changing the name is a good thing because many women are not as courageous as my wife and would not feel comfortable "crashing" the banquet.
As a pastor I always insisted that the Mother's Day recognition in church be about all the women in the church, not just the ones who were actually mothers. That made sense to me. As Sue always says, "we all have mothers," so why should the women without children be left out of the recognition and the small gifts that the children hand out to the "mothers" in the congregation?
Many of the single women or married childless women would come and thank me for including them. But you would be surprised, at least I was, at how many people would come to me and tell me that they resented extending the Mother's Day recognition to those who were not mothers.
I was always miffed at their narrowmindedness. I often looked them straight in the eye and said something like, "You know, don't you, Harriet, that Mother's Day is not a church related event? I hope you realize that Mother's Day was conceived to sell cards and flowers. You are lucky that we recognize it at all. In some churches they ignore it."
So I say that Mother's Day should recognize all women and not be so damned exclusive that we use it to exclude women who have not had children. Ditto with Father's Day. It is easy to see who we honor and why, all the while forgetting who we ignore and hurt.
The final thing that I would like to say about Mother's Day is the hardest thing I have to say. I kind of wish I were not writing this, but I believe it needs to be said. It applies to Father's Day as well.
There will be a lot of people reading this post and the many Mother's Day tribute posts who have very bad memories of the way they were treated by their mothers and/or fathers. I happen to be one who has very mixed memories of my mother, and they are mostly negative.
I would be lying if I said that I loved her in the way that I know many of you love your moms. For decades I tried to pretend that I loved her like that, wondered what was wrong with me when I didn't, and kept trying to rewrite history to make her fit into the cookie cutter molded mother that we are supposed to have.
The truth is that my mother, on occasion, could and did smother me with love when it suited her purposes. But many more times she beat me, hit me with any weapon that was close, pulled my hair, washed my mouth out with soap, grounded me for weeks on end for the slightest reason, knocked me down, and locked me in my bedroom.
More times than I can count she grabbed me by the hair, pulled me into my bedroom, slammed the door and made me suffer by saying "Wait 'til your Dad gets home and he will show you that I mean what I say!" And in terror I would wait until Dad came home, be called into the living room and she would scream at him about all the evil things I had done that day. Dad would try to talk her out of the spanking but she would insist that he take off his belt and beat me with it.
I have always loved my step Dad. But his only fault was that he always gave in to her. So I would have to lean over a chair and he would hit me with his belt until she said to stop. And if he didn't hit hard enough or long enough to satisfy her she would scream at him to hit me harder. If that didn't work she would rip the belt out of his hands and do it herself. Many times the welts on my back and butt were so bad that they bled.
And there were many, many more ways that she manipulated the family and kept us all in fear. But as the oldest son by nine years I was the one she hurt the most.
As she got older she lost some of the steam of the anger that was deep inside of her. After I moved out, and my younger brothers had less of a sense of obligation to honor her, as they got older they would stand up to her together, something that I did not do until the day she hit me in the face with a wooden coat hanger, cracked it, and went to hit me again. I grabbed her wrist and said, "never again."
I was 17, and moved out the next day, but the damage was done during the time between my 6th year when she took me from my grandmother and my 17th year when I left.
How do people who have little love for their mothers deal with this day, people who desperately want to remember shreds of the good times, because they are elusive in our memories, overwhelmed by the bad memories which are vivid to this day?
One thing I know is that for those of us who have few good memories of our mothers, or of our fathers, those who struggle to find some small coincidences of love and good times as we read all the really wonderful tribute pieces that are posted here about our mothers; well, for us it is hard to do.
We want to join in the tributes. We are happy that so many of our OS friends had good childhoods. We rejoice in their happiness. And, yes, we know that there were good things about our mothers. There really were. But we have to say that, on balance, the scales tip clearly toward the negative.
We are not jealous. We are not wounded. We are not frightened. We were all of those things during our childhood. We have all mostly come to accept the reality of our childhood, and have moved on. But we are simply not part of the Mother's Day outpouring of love, and we will never be. The truth is that to say that we cherish our mothers we would be lying.
So when some of your OS friends don't write tributes to their mothers this weekend, please try not to wonder why, or judge them. Be patient with them because none of us can get inside another person's mind. And the truth may be that they simply may have had a very different childhood that you had.
God bless the child, regardless of the memories he or she brought into adulthood.
Monte
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