He is crying.
It has been a long winter here and my younger sibling has spent a great portion of it fighting flashbacks, the kind that beat you into the ground until you are rendered almost helpless, begging for mercy.
The man is babbling.
His psychiatrist has just diagnosed him with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this is the last in a series of troubling discoveries concerning his waning mental health.
The babbling seems to be about a wooden spoon.
While we were growing up, the above and aforementioned spoon could be found in our kitchen, more than likely in the middle drawer beside the pantry.
As he babbles, memories concerning this spoon flood to the forefront of my mind. I can almost smell the spaghetti sauce as I recall my mother stirring the secret family recipe while it bubbled and simmered the day away.
Our mother passed on, in July of 1991.
She was only 57 years young that summer.
Her only daughter will be 58 come this August.
That summer like her spaghetti sauce is forever printed in my memory.
I get up to hand my brother a kleenex.
I was terrified of that spoon; he sobs. I remember her coming at me. I was just a little guy and I would be on my bed in the fetal position…and she would be coming after me….
The 50-year-old man’s hands tremble as he wipes his nose.
What? I thought we were talking about tomatoes and basil and homemade love and garlic bread…
But in truth, relationships are that way. Our memories of loved ones and our feelings towards them ebb and flow as we go from day to day, year to year.
Yesterday, I received a card in the mail from a little boy who lives a few thousand miles away from his mommy.
Yes, my Mother’s Day card is here, safe and sound and on time.
The recipient does not at all resemble the platitudinous superlatives that have been heaped upon her in the over-elegant font, I would have liked sparkles though. always a good touch, I think. Have you ever noticed how we can send a man to the moon but they can’t seem to find glue for sparkles to stay….
This last year has not exactly been my shining hour as a mother. I let my ego get in the way and thus I was a no-show at his wedding, and if that wasn’t enough when my child visited in February for 5 days, I managed to turn into a complete harpy and shrew.
Like greeting cards, relationships can lose their sparkles too. God, if I had an editor, there would be a big red line through that last sentence.
What I mean to say, all REAL relationships should be complicated, ambivalent, ever-changing and imperfect.
Like my friend Trisha likes to say; three dimensional.
As a society, we seem to be either canonizing the women who brought us into this world or demonizing them to the point where we make them all powerful and make them bear far too much responsibility for their own end product.
That product is us.
There were many sides to my mother.She was the woman who gathered my entire wardrobe and threw it on our front lawn after I announced my elopement at the age of 25. Talk about airing your family’s dirty laundry in public.
She was also the woman who kept my then husband, myself and my son financially alive while she, herself was dying from liver cancer.
Everything in life was either black or white, nothing was ever in between for her.
She was always right and I was always in the wrong.
And if perchance, I was ever right, she wouldn’t ever admit it.
Every year, Mother’s Day was a nightmare, I never got it right. I always bought the wrong flowers, showed up at the wrong time in the wrong dress….. married the wrong man (actually, she did get that one right).
The lesson?
Mothers like their children are works in progress, sometimes they get it right and sometimes they screw it up.
But the intent, trust me on this one, is usually to do good and to get it right.
As for spoons?
They can hurt you and they can make you cry.
Or they can lovingly stir your family’s secret recipes.
So on Sunday, do yourself a favor.
Look at your life and your relationships in their proper perspective. No canonizing, no demonizing.
Say a prayer.
Pray for REAL relationships in your life. Pray that they be complicated, ambivalent, ever-changing and imperfect.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!.
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