Not Your Usual Mother's Day

Well, it’s that time—the day when, in my mother’s words, they trot the old girl out of the rest home, stick an orchid corsage on her, and turn her into mother of the year. It’s all around me. I’ve been getting gooey forwarded e-mails and the supermarkets are full of folk snapping up bouquets. I guess it’s nice that we can have a cathartic cry in our beer over the little, grey-haired old lady who sacrificed so much for us to get ahead, except for the selective memory going on. The gooey-est e-mail I read—the one saying that “mother” is another word for “angel”—came from a friend whose mother was a major narcissist and with whom she has an estranged relationship. I guess it is silly time in family relationships.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, families are fraught with the perils common to all human endeavors. Given the odds of a congenial bundle of joy landing on one’s doorstep, it’s a miracle if the personalities thrust under one roof get along. Some people just naturally seem to have the skills to raise children who love one another (to my mind, the primary parental responsibility other than keeping the kids from killing themselves) but also in my experience it’s more likely that people unthinkingly visit on their children all the misery with which they were raised and then expect special recognition for having done so. My former mother-in-law, as an example, expected sweet, flowery expressions of appreciation regardless of how unpleasant and demanding she had been through the years. And she was not above comparing cards from her offspring so she could judge who she thought loved and appreciated her more.

Don’t get me wrong—I am no mother hater. But I am a pragmatist. Since my mother died in 1985, hardly a year goes by without some major reevaluation on my part. Some of the things she did for me were kind and marvelous. Others were highly destructive. The contradiction between what she intended and what she accomplished was so extreme as to leave me completely confused.

It’s been the work of the last twenty years of my life to try to figure out who she was completely separate from her role in my life. Interesting question: if I had met and worked with her and not been her daughter, what would I have thought of her? If I answer honestly, the result would have been mixed.

On the one hand, as a colleague rather than a daughter, I could have admired her commitment to life and her optimism that somehow, no matter things appeared, there was something within her power she could do that would turn things around. For the most part, she succeeded. I could have respected her dedication to her nursing profession. Her patients and fellow staff respected her skills. She did a job well and took pride in it; she was loyal and no quitter. I could also have admired her strong sense of responsibility—she gave her best—and her slightly off-kilter but wonderful sense of humor.

At the same time, I am her daughter. I know even colleagues would (and did) find it difficult to deal with her emotional outbursts. Her feelings for someone could change dramatically in an instant and she looked on disagreement as betrayal, although an outsider might have been easier to know what was likely to upset her. Until I grew too old to be physically disciplined, I couldn’t always connect my punishment to whichever one of my numerous sins had got me in trouble (probably my tendency to answer back—but that’s another issue). If I hadn’t been her daughter and what she called “high-strung,” perhaps I might have understood more of the incredible pressures she was under, raising a child alone first in post-war Britain and then in Canada, a completely new country. But that would have been asking a great deal of a child, even one who accepted immense amounts of responsibility at a very young age.

It's taken me years to even get to the point where I can begin to sort out my feelings for this complex, forceful woman who blew through my life like a hurricane.

I suppose we are all mixed bags of successes and failures as parents. I hope one day that my son doesn't write something like this about me. All I can say is I tried my best, which I am sure she would say also. This is why I think there should be an asterisk and footnote to this whole idea of Mother’s Day. By all means, let’s celebrate the things that went well in our family dynamics. At the same time, though, I think the day should permit us to lay out both the strengths and the weaknesses of what we learned from our parents, meditate on our relations with our own children, and see if we can lessen the baggage we pass on from one generation to the next.