WHAT IS A MOTHER

Photo by Joey Thompson on Unsplash

We’ve got a crème caramel cooling on the counter and a friend has brought a homemade chicken pie. I spent the afternoon plying with Barbie dolls, a first, I had banned these  dolls from my household when my kids were growing up. What message were these freakishly shaped creatures going to send to my daughters? But this time when I hunkered down on the floor with my little granddaughter, I realized how much fun it was to dress and undress them, to compare fluffy hair with ringlets, put the on and take them off plastic horses, and stuff them in their little cars. We hid them under a chair and covered them with blankets when a storm was coming or a witch had been sighted, I loved every minute. I didn’t enjoy playing with my own children until they were old enough to talk. Some of the mothers I know say the same thing, It is so boring, we whispered, and then laughed nervously., I loved to read to my kids and I loved to talk with them, but Monopoly? Hearts? Parcheesi? I’d so much rather have been stirring a baked Indian pudding while my kids fooled around on the kitchen floor. Perhaps there was some evolutionary reason: if we played with the kids we wouln’t be alert to the saber-toothed tiger coming down the pike. But grandmothers play.

SWhen I get home I find my youngest daughter Catherine up from Phillie for a couple of days.I am glad to see her, but my plan has been to go directly to Woodstock and watch snow melt. I’ve got a million student theses to read and work of my own to do, but here is Catherine, and now it seems Sarah is on her way into the city and they want me to have dinner with them.I change my mind so many times that my trajectory gets droopy and I wind up staying and of course we have a wonderful time together.But driving up to Woodstock the next day I begin to wonder what kind of person I am. How could I have wanted to leave more than I wanted to stay? I muddle about this even though I know better. I turn up the Rolling Stones to drive guilt out of my mind and it works all the way up to the thruway. Because a mother has her wants and needs and pleasures and fears that are separate from her family, right?

     When I was growing up I thought of a mother as a kind iof live household appliance tootling around the house tidying up cheerfully and then providing a comfy lap for sleepy offspring. That his did not describe my mother  made little difference. It certainly did not describe me. Any romantic notion that motherhood imbued one with instant grace, patience, wisdom, humor and household skills went out the window.I was a teenager when I had my first child, and remained an adolescent for a long time afterward.When Sarah was a baby, all the other mothers seemed older and more capable than I was, that’s because they were older and more capable. They seemed to know more because they did know more. I was inadequate, young, unskilled. For a while I lived nest door to a woman whose three layer birthday cakes for her daughter had red flowers and silver candies on top. I had neer een seen cake pans as big as this cake. She sewed all her family’s clothes, too, including her husband’s suits. Meanwhile, I was putting a spoiled leg of lamb in the over hoping the awful smell was some kind of mistake that would fix itself I was furtively burying a diaper pail under the rose bushes in the middle of the night. Left untouched for weeks, I just couldn’t face what it contained.

     Nor was the gift of grace under pressure bestowed on me. As my children grew, my attempts at discipline were not successful. My mother had found, “Because I say so,” effective, but when I tried that, nobody listened. I admit liked the fact that my kids were not afraid of me as my sisters and I had been afraid of our mother. And there were times when I couldn’t stifle a laugh. I locked myself in the bathroom one day, hoping for a little privacy,  but the kids were banging on the door  with comp0laints and requests and I replied by hollering out exactly what I was doing. I heard my then six year old daughter Sarah say in a dignified voice, “Well, mother, you certainly have a way with words.”

My second marriage was not a happy one, and this was a blow I couldn’t absorb. I fell apart, and my kids suffered. Where were my eyes and ears? What was I thinking? I was trying to write poetry and drinking a good deal of Jack Daniels, among other things. My children’s problems became more serious with adolescence. And on top of that we were now living in a suburb of the city, a dreadful mismatch for me and my city kids. For years I was paralyzed with guilt over what had become of my family. After the second divorce my little son Ralph went ott to boarding school even though he begged to come home; (something that still haunts me although he is now sixty); Sarah had already moved in with her boyfriend. Jen was also at boarding school and Catherine was with her father in the city. I was a mother with no kids, and no other identity handy. I was staying temporarily in the house in the suburbs but it was for sale. I had no job and certainly no resume, but I found an apartment and was grateful to find a job, but meanwhile I had fallen in love again. For more years than I want to think about, falling in. love was my specialty. All I had to do was find the right man and everything else would fall into place. I wound up behaving more like one of my kids that their parent.

Looking back, I realize I thought there was a right way to be a mother. I thought you needed to know things I didn’t know, to have the right words for any problem, any sadness, any conflict. I  didn’t yet know that there were moments for which no words could be found. My daughter Sarah was two months pregnant with my eldest grandson. Sarah pregnant was such a happy thing for us all, there is nothing like new life to extend the landscape. It was a rainy July morning when my son-in-law called to tell me Sarah was afraid she miscarrying. “Should I come?” I asked. I felt strangely shy of intruding. “My wife needs her mother,” is what he said, and all at once I understood everything. It was so simple.

     Just be there.