Ironing shirts, folding sheets, the mundane tasks that Seamus Heaney transformed into magical spots of time that make me think of 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. And I’ll hear Seamus Heaney remembering his own mother. 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 a blue 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.”
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.”
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
In Ireland, Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday in Lent thereby falling on a different date every year. In America, Mother’s Day arrives each year on the second Sunday in May. As a mother living in America with a mother living in Northern Ireland, I should by now have developed a strategy to cope with this annual conundrum. Especially this year when I have depended so heavily – and daily since the breast cancer diagnosis – on the comforting colloquialisms from the woman on the other end of the line, on the other side of the world. My mother.
Without the email reminders from online florists and the showy Hallmark displays that will soon pop up in the grocery store, I missed Mothering Sunday. Again. I’m perplexed by my failure to outsmart the calendar, given that I have been rather clever in the past, proactively purchasing two Mother’s Day cards in May, so I’d have a spare one for the “real” Mother’s Day, the subsequent year. Invariably, however, the extra card has disappeared for a time and then mocked me by reappearing in a folder with “other important papers” before it’s time to file our taxes on April 15th.
I am drawn to an enduring childhood memory of my younger brother and me. In our Sunday best, we are falling into line with the other children to proceed up the aisle of Antrim’s All Saints Parish Church, and finally collect from the beaming minister a single fresh flower to give to our mother. Our mother, who when I called her today, told me the only thing she wanted this Mother’s Day was to hear my voice and to know that I am healthy. Of course that is all she wants. Regardless, I still feel guilty about having missed the deadline for same-day delivery of flowers, and the time difference didn’t help matters either. To be rational, I know all the flowers in the world mean little to this woman who has tossed and turned too many nights since November 11th, when she cried out in disbelief that “her wee girl has cancer.” Cruel and ironic that at 74, just when she thought she didn’t need to watch over me any more, she must experience the sleeplessness I imagine is known only by mothers whose children are lost or sick or in trouble. But it is difficult to be rational and sentimental at the same time.
After our conversation today, I found myself pondering all those Mothering Sunday cards we dutifully made as children, year after year, at Antrim Primary School. As a little girl, I was unaware that this day, its very existence on a calendar, could sting and shun. As a grown woman, I know better. I know there is a greeting card to capture almost every sentiment and exploit every ounce of guilt. Why then would I be surprised to discover there are even online greeting card companies where I can customize a cancer greeting card, to let “my friend or loved one with cancer” know I’m thinking about them?
For my mother, I have gladly handed over a small fortune on greeting cards. Admittedly, some were perhaps a little less about making her day and a little more about assuaging my guilt about having put down roots so far away from home.
To confirm my suspicion that others know how to make a penny or two off this guilt, I took a quick trip via Google to the corporate page of undisputed heavy-weight champion of the greeting card industry, Hallmark Inc. Ruefully, I learned that along with millions of other people, my loyal patronage has led Hallmark to report what the Kansas City Business Journal describes as a “flat” $4.1 billion in revenue for 2011. $4.1 billion in revenue. Flat? Flat enough for me to consider never again handing over a fistful of dollars for a folded piece of card-stock with a generic message and a stock photograph.
Marie over at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer posits the notion of “reclaiming this day so all women can feel included.” I think I’ll heed her call. I do not know how the “Mothering Sunday” tradition began; it may, like a lot of things, have its origins in mythology. I suppose the cancer and getting older has me thinking about what can happen when myth and religion, culture and politics collide. With that, when the American Mother’s Day appears on my calendar this year, I hope I think of reclaiming it in the way Marie suggests. I hope that what crosses my mind is not whether I get a Hallmark card, a handmade card, a bunch of flowers, or all three, but that I consider the day as one that also 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.
Mostly, on the upcoming Mother’s Day, I will miss my mother. A phone call or a chat on Skype will help close the distance between the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and Phoenix, Arizona, but it will not be the same as handing her a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. My mother is wholly responsible for my appreciation and, as my husband will attest, my expectation of a bunch of flowers as an apology, a get-well wish, a thank-you, a birthday greeting, or a just-because (like the fresh bouquets my father used to pull from our garden and hastily wrap in newspaper as a present for my primary school teachers).
It moves me to imagine my mother this Mothering Sunday, placing tulips of remembrance on the grave of her mother, my granny. Tomorrow, March 19th would be the date of granny’s birthday, and my mother will weep. She tells me she was pregnant with my brother in 1969 when my granny fell so ill. My mother had wanted to surprise her on a day when she was feeling better, with the wonderful news that a new grandchild was on the way, but a better day stayed just out of reach. So the 2012 calendar is doubly cruel for my mother with its American Mother’s Day still to come, falling, as it always does, on the second Sunday in May. This year, it arrives on May 13th. The following day will be the 43rd anniversary of the day her mother died. I know she will miss her all over again, as if it happened just yesterday.
