This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding our beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . .
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
In aspecial for CNBC, Anna Andrianova shares the National Retail Federation’s estimate that $20.7 billion will be spent next Sunday, Mother’s Day in America. How easily that number rolls off the tongue – twenty-point-seven-billion-dollars – but what does it mean? A lot, of course. Years ago, I told my students to avoid using “a lot” in their compositions, because it was too vague. “A lot” of money to, say, Oprah or Donald Trump, is something altogether different from “a lot” of money in my wallet, the latter implying I remembered to bring cash for parking or I happened upon the hundred-dollar bill I once hid between two wallet-size photographs, knowing I would forget about it and be surprised when I found it. Typically, I only carry a debit card, and if I have cash at all, it is probably the result of returning to Marshalls a thing I didn’t need in the first place and opting for cash instead of a credit to my card when the nice cashier asks how I would like my refund. To help me appreciate what one, let alone twenty billion dollars looks like, I did some poking around and found at Wealthy Matters which may or may not be a reliable online source, that for this sum, I could stay at the Burj Al Arab luxury hotel in Dubai. For 137 years (at $20,000 a night). Or I could spring for forty idyllic private islands. Multiply that by twenty, and you will come very close to understanding just how well Hallmark will fare on Mother’s Day followed closely by those in the business of flowers, jewels, and chocolate. On their corporate page, Hallmark proudly declares, “cards reflect our culture.” I’ll say. There is a greeting card to capture almost every sentiment and to exploit every ounce of guilt.
Still, and although I am not his mother, my husband knows I will be annoyed should he not take advantage of the opportunity the second Sunday in May presents to commission for me a work of art by our teenage daughter. There are twenty-point-seven-billion reasons why he does not need to trudge to the mall, our girl in tow, searching for a “for my wife on Mother’s day” card or a gift he can purchase for me on her behalf. True, there have been birthdays, Mother’s Days, and Christmasses past, when my favorite duo visited very antique shop in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, on a quest for something bijou that would bring whimsy to our backyard. Every one of those gifts, I accepted with glee, from napping cats wrought of stone and metal, to fading windsocks and wind chimes of bamboo that would toil less were they hung from a cypress tree on the coast of Monterey.
Iknow my odds of acquiring a piece of original art by my daughter are greatly increased if her father asks her to do it and if his request coincides with a federal holiday or a special occasion on the United States calendar. Of course, she will do it because it is Mother’s Day, and it doesn’t even bother me if it feels obligatory; I want frozen in time this time in which she loves to draw, to create at her own pace and to her own drummer, without pressure from deadlines or critics. Admittedly, I fear this passion for art might disappear as though a phase to be outgrown, a bit like the way she eventually took umbrage against pigtails in her hair, Mary Janes on her feet, playing the piano, and leaving notes for Tooth Fairy Zoe and an assortment of pixie pals that live in the trees in our backyard.
As a child, I was imaginative, but there is little hard evidence of it. I was not a “maker” of things, unlike my mother who, out of necessity, made clothes and cakes and what would now be called “artisanal” paper packages tied up with string and my father who made gardens grow, cars run, houses more spacious, and children happy with his hand-crafted toys (he even made a guitar for his brother when he was just ten years old). Maybe this explains my enchantment with my daughter’s labors of love, and when she lets me in while wondering aloud where life will take her, I jump at the opportunity to tell her she will never make enough money to do work she does not love and to remind myself of something I underlined in red a long time ago, in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World:
Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus–these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify … writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.
The older I get, the more I appreciate evidence of such labors all around me – from Sophie’s drawings to the dark boughs of ourChilean mesquite treeweighed down with a haphazard assortment of wind-chimes and rusty things that twirl and spin in warm desert winds. From the uppermost branches, hang bird houses of weathered wood, veritable treasures crafted from trash scavenged by artisan, David Bruce. In his hands, scrap lumber and sheet metal, random doorknobs, rusty garden fixtures, tarnished silver forks and spoons turn over and into art.
For about a decade, Bruce constructed these whimsical abodes that could withstand the extreme Phoenix temperatures in his workshop, “Weathered Wonders.” A welcome splash of Dr. Seuss-decor on an otherwise humdrum street in Phoenix, it was displaced in 2009 when the ubiquitous Circle K moved in. Were it not for that utterly depressing fact, our great mesquite tree would be home to more of his “avian art.” As Bruce says himself: “For some people, these birdhouses are like Lays potato chips. They can’t just have one.”
I am one of those people and driving by that space where he once labored, I long to see the row of houses he set down each morning on an urban sidewalk, little labors of love in better days.
Around his fiftieth birthday, in the 1991 collection, Seeing Things, poet Seamus Heaney writes the beautiful “Fosterling,” the beginning of which finds him recollecting a picture he loved at school, presumably a landscape of the County Derry of his childhood:
Fosterling
“That heavy greenness fostered by water“
At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness – Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails. The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness Still more in place when mirrored in canals. I can’t remember not ever having known The immanent hydraulics of a land Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone. My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens. Me waiting until I was nearly fifty To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten, Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.
And here I sit, on the south-western corner of another continent, far away, and at fifty crediting Heaney’s poetry and back home and wondering how or why I waited so long to see things above, within, and around me . . . to credit the marvelous.
I have worked in public education long enough that it is not uncommon for me to encounter former students, some of whom are now married with careers and children. It is always surreal to meet these adults who, just a twinkling ago, were writing in their composition books about who they would become when they were all grown up. Likewise, they are incredulous to learn that I am now the parent of a daughter who is older than they were when they were my fifth grade students. Equally perturbed by this scenario and all its implications is my daughter, and I find all of it highly entertaining – my former students confronting the truth that there really was more to me than being their teacher and my daughter forced to face the realty that once upon a time I was not her mother and other people’s children took up most of my time (and they also thought I was cool with great taste in clothes, music, and hair). And, before that, there was another time when I was as young as she, with my mother at the ironing board, telling me, “Daughter dear, the world is your oyster.”
My mother is miles away today, and I miss her the way I do every day, but it is Mothering Sunday which makes missing her more poignant. I know I need only pick up the phone to slip softly into the comforting colloquialisms of home. But it’s not the same. Even though she says not to waste money a card, I know my mother loves to hear the tell-tale envelope fall through the letter box. This year, the perfect card peeked out at me from a random section of the greeting card department. An inconvenient truth – the “official” Mother’s Day cards won’t appear in stores for another month. Because the American Mother’s Day arrives on the second Sunday in May, after St. Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter, Administrative Professional’s Day, Cinco De Mayo, and Nurse’s Day, if I want to buy a card for my mother, I must rely on my memory almost a year in advance.
I always thought I had a sharp memory. Until last week. It was a typical early morning Facebook exchange between my brother and me, during which I shared a spectacular, cringe-worthy – and, let it be noted, extremely rare – example of my forgetfulness. I imagine I felt a bit like Meryl Streep when she was so frazzled by not getting the Donegal accent quite right for her role in Dancing at Lughnasa that she forgot her lines.
“I never forget my lines!” she tells a fawning James Lipton inside his Actor’s Studio. Like me, Meryl Streep has a phenomenal memory that she can always count on. At least she did, before menopause. To hear her describe the shock of not being able to remember and to be thoroughly enchanted by the divine Meryl Streep, start the video at 26:49:
Unlike Mr. Lipton, my brother did not think to grovel his way back into my favor, by bringing up my stellar ability to remember great chunks of Wilfred Owen’s poetry or dialogue from When Harry Met Sally or Goodfellas or what my best friend’s boyfriend’s sister wore to a disco in 1982. Of my memory lapse, and without missing a beat, he typed back: “I know you have had a traumatic couple of year, but really my dear, that is CLASSIC you. You’ve a head on you like a sieve!!!!!!!
A purist who rarely resorts to the exclamation mark, my brother clearly believed the words flying from his fingers. Or maybe he was just trying to get a rise out of me. Opting for the latter, I protested with a sprinkling of playful question marks, exclamation points, and various other symbols, wondering (but not with any seriousness) if he was confusing me with somebody else, like our mother. She will tell you herself that she can’t remember anything. But he wasn’t having any of that. Emphatically, NO! with even more exclamation marks: “No!!!!! Your memory and recall of specific events, places and things has always been appalling!!!! You do have good emotional recall. You’ll recall how you felt about a thing, but damn all about what actually went down.” And then he had the cheek to add a ubiquitous little smiley face 🙂 to soften the next blow: “Oh, sorry. I’m probably just overstating it now. But your memory was never, never, ever, by any stretch of the imagination, “amazing.” In any way, shape, or form.”
Admittedly, that “emotional recall” part sounded reasonable, and in an instant I was in Mr. Jones’ class with the Lyrical Ballads learning about Wordsworth who was not one of my favorites until this very moment, because he said that poetry was “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Of course my brother didn’t think to go to such lengths.
Sensing, perhaps, whatever it is that you’d call a lull in the middle of a silent Facebook “chat,” he began a cover-up, breezily adding that it was probably just his silly old memory that was at fault. Perhaps he just doesn’t remember that I have a good memory. More smiley faces and a bold “LOL.” To give him his due, he offered some reassurance by telling me I’ve never forgotten anything important. Unless, of course, we’re talking about Mother’s Day, which I was until I remembered how I felt about finding out I have a bad memory.
As I was saying, reminders of the American Mother’s Day pop up in emails from Teleflora or showy Hallmark displays in the grocery store or at the carwash after the Irish Mother’s Day has passed. I have developed a strategy to cope with this annual conundrum, outsmarting the calendar with the clever purchase of two Mother’s Day cards in May – one as a sort of consolation prize for possibly having forgotten the Irish Mother’s Day, the other for the subsequent March. It is a brilliant plan, except it rarely works, because I will put the card in a safe place i.e. lose it amongst bills and all the other papers I need for the Tax Filing Deadline Day which, naturally, is sandwiched between the two Mother’s Days (but after my birthday) along with all the aforementioned holidays that someone has kindly listed on the Greeting Card Universe website. Seriously.
But seriously, because it is Mothering Sunday, I am drawn to an enduring memory of my brother and me, to a time when he had more respect for his elders. Scrubbed clean, uncomfortable in our Sunday best with all the other children, we are proceeding in a crooked line to the front of the aisle of Antrim’s All Saints Parish Church, where we will collect from a beaming Reverend Thornton a single fresh flower to give to our mother. I was going to send flowers this year, but instead opted for a gift of gourmet brownies from a company in the Cotswolds. I knew it would remind ma of the wonderful Christmas we just spent together, and the night I baked a pan of chocolate fudge brownies while she and my dad were napping. More than that, the appeal of the Bluebasil Brownie company was in the packaging. The brownies would arrive in a brown paper package tied up with string, the kind of package that usually travels across the sea from my mother’s address to mine.
For almost thirty years, my mother has been sending me such packages – boxes filled with Antrim Guardian newspaper clippings about people I used to know but might not immediately remember, chocolate for my daughter, the obligatory three or four packets of Tayto cheese and onion, and always something for me to wear. (This last is typically something for which she paid entirely too much, and something I really don’t need, but she always dismisses it as “just-something-to-throw-on”). My husband remains somewhat intrigued by the brown wrapping paper and the string, but what neither he nor my mother realizes is that, by all accounts, consumer demand for her type of handiwork has gone rather mainstream. At any moment, we are but a few clicks away from the Bluebasil Brownies, artisanal gift-wrapping, jam-making and even the knitting of very complicated Aaran sweaters, all of which she has practiced and perfected since childhood.
My mother’s first job was in Crawford’s shop in Castledawson. At the counter, she learned, among other things, how to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. As she had learned to bake and sew by watching my grandmother, so she watched Jim Crawford skillfully wrap parcels for the customers. Soon she was expertly preparing packages of sweets and biscuits for those who wanted to send a taste of home to relatives across the water. Mrs. O’Connor, whose daughter was in England; Jim Crawford himself, who had devised a way to tie newspapers with string so they could be easily mailed to his relatives far away in Australia. Such a newspaper arrived here last week. My mother still has the knack for it and is quick to remind me that all this wrapping and knot-tying was long before there was any such thing as Sellotape or Scotch tape, so sometimes she would carefully pour sealing wax over the knotted string. There is both heart and craft in such an activity. But it is only in recent years that I have appreciated it, along with many of my mother’s gifts.
I have no idea how the ”Mothering Sunday” tradition began; it may, like a lot of things, have its origins in mythology. It is certainly a profitable day for the greeting card companies. I wonder about the impact of this marked day that belongs to children without mothers and to mothers with sick children, to women who ache to be biological mothers but are unable, to mothers whose children no longer speak to them and to children whose mothers have disowned them, perhaps over a grudge or because the Alzheimer’s has rendered them strangers. What of them?
So on this Mothering Sunday, I am celebrating my mother as not only the first but the best woman I will ever know. The card says, “The truth is. Even if she weren’t my Mom, I would go out of my way to be friends with her.”
As those former students remind my daughter, I am reminding myself that my mother has always been the woman who would be my best friend. I just didn’t always know it.
Here’s to you, ma, and the friend you have always been.
Love and miss you every day.
my mother, far right, with her sister and friends holidaying in Portrush
friends laughing in the rain
as a young wife. In Wicklow town, as she and my dad traveled through Ireland on a 7 days for 7 shillings trip
a new mother in 1963 in their first home in Dunsilly, County Antrim
my mother with her first grandchild and me, Belfast 1998
a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand:street markets where local artisans display handwoven textiles, painted ceramics, and leather goods
It never fails. When a brown paper package tied up with string arrives at my door, I begin ruminating on old words about old ways of living that are creeping back into our lexicon – “vintage,” “organic,” or “artisanal.” Redolent of superior quality, the “master artisan” has always conjured the likes of Antonio Stradivari or in more recent times, the brilliant Dale Chihuly, whose stunning glasswork appears to grow right next to cacti in the Desert Botanical Garden, transforming it forever for me. It also brings to mind the master cobbler I first encountered in a shop in Florence, Italy. I can still see him, bent over a supple piece of leather, hands moving deftly as he shaped it in the form of a shoe that would invariably grace the foot of a tourist.
In retrospect, he was not unlike the men and women whose artisanal handiwork imbued the rural County Derry where my parents grew up. As a matter of economic necessity, they were “good with their hands” and frugal too. Thus their farming, knitting, dress-making, baking, turf-cutting, and roof-thatching was shaped by and shaped the villages and towns in which they lived.The poetry of Seamus Heaney is peopled with such artisans as the solitary, quiet Thatcher.
Then fixed the ladder, laid out well honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.
Couchant for days on sods above rafters
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.
Somewhere in Heaney’s notion of “pinning down” one’s world, a handful at a time, art and living surely converge.
Far away from Derry, in a world that might not be so different after all, the Rust Belt of the United States is the backdrop for Carlo Rotelli’s Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt. Within it, he explores the symbiotic relationship between the artistry and the environments of an unlikely lineup including bluesman Buddy Guy, pugilist, Liz McGonigal, and former New York city cop turned movie-producer, Sonny Grosso. Like the turf-cutter, the thatcher, and the blacksmith of Heaney’s poetry, these too have honed the “deceptively unsimple virtue” of being good with their hands. Their handiwork is forever inextricably bound to their worlds.
For years, my mother has been sending me brown paper packages tied up with string – boxes filled with Antrim Guardian newspaper clippings about people I used to know but might not remember, Cadbury’s chocolate for my daughter, the obligatory three or four packets of Tayto cheese and onion, Barrys Teabags, and always something for me to wear. (This last is typically something for which she paid entirely too much, and something I really don’t need, but she always dismisses me with a “it’s just-something-to-throw-on”).
My husband was always been bemused by the brown wrapping paper and the string, but what he never realized (and my mother may not either) is that, by all accounts, consumer demand for her type of handiwork has gone rather mainstream. At any moment, we are but a few clicks away from artisanal gift-wrapping, jam-making or the knitting of very complicated Aaran sweaters, all of which she has practiced and perfected since childhood. I have knit only twice in my life. The first time, I had to produce a pair of slippers for Domestic Science class. Seriously. I remember it took forever to cast purple stitches on fat grey knitting needles, and then there was the daily grind of “knit one, purl one,” until those ugly slippers were finished. My mother intervened of course, but her neat rows of stitches were too obviously different from mine, and she didn’t want me to get in trouble. Which I imagine I did. I have no idea what would have possessed me to undertake knitting a second time, but years later, I knit a sweater (mostly by myself). So impressed with my handiwork, I even wore it out a time or two. Alas, it literally fell by the wayside as we made our way to Slane Castle on the warm July afternoon of Bruce Springsteen’s Irish debut. That was the end of the knitting for me, but my mother only grew more skilled, taking on increasingly complex patterns, her needles clicking ever more rapidly it seemed.
My mother’s first job was in Crawford’s shop in Castledawson, and that is where she learned, among other things, how to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. As she had learned to bake and sew by watching my grandmother, so she watched Jim Crawford skillfully wrap parcels for the customers. Soon she was expertly preparing packages of sweets and biscuits for those who wanted to send a taste of home to relatives across the water, Mrs. O’Connor, whose daughter was in England; Jim Crawford himself had devised a way to tie newspapers with string so they could be easily mailed to relatives far away in Australia. I imagine one such newspaper will be making its way to me soon – my mother believes she still has the knack for it. She is quick to remind me that all this wrapping and knot-tying was long before there was any such thing as Sellotape (Scotch Tape) so sometimes she would use a seal wax over the knotted string.
Years later, when my mother was home with us, one of her favorite jobs was “backing books.” By the first day of school in September, she had saved brown wrapping paper for this special task. Anyone from my part of the world will readily acknowledge that our teachers were very particular about the way our books were backed. There was definitely an art to it, and so naturally it fell under my mother’s bailiwick. She could barely wait for September when my brother and I would get our new school books for the year. I can still see her waiting in our kitchen in the house on the Dublin Road, brown paper and scissors ready. Each book she placed carefully in the middle of a sheet of brown paper, and with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she had it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front. I remember one September, because my mother was ill and in the hospital, I had taken it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Of course I couldn’t do it right. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look so easy, but unlike my mother I had not learned by watching. It was impossible for me to get the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who clearly cared not about the fact that my mother lay in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in those moments. Over thirty five years later, I can still feel the flush of embarrassment on my face. I have never forgotten or forgiven his lack of sensitivity. I am sad to report that I was reminded of it once more, just five months ago when a teacher was inexcusably cruel to my daughter – in front of her classmates and in spite of knowing that while he casually broke her spirit, her mother was recovering from cancer surgery.
Perhaps being good with one’s hands is somehow connected to being in good hands. Handled with care. A hand-wrapped parcel from Crawford’s shop was done right and with great care. There was heart and craft in it.
erhaps being good with one’s hands is somehow connected to being in good hands. Handled with care. A hand-wrapped parcel from Crawford’s shop was done right and with great care. There was heart and craft in it.
