Mamma Mia

The requisite Mother's Day post, a day late

Greetings on this second Sunday, oops Monday, of May. As I pondered my mother’s life yesterday, I dipped into the archives of My Mother’s Attic and decided to patch together and update a couple of older remembrances in her honor. Hope you enjoy!

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As I believe I mentioned in my Christmas post, big splashy holidays sometimes still my fingers on the keyboard. Hard to come up with a single fresh thought at a time when it feels like the entire planet is striving to do the same. Besides, to adapt a bit of Lucy Van Pelt, we all know Mother’s Day is just another commercial racket, run by a big Eastern syndicate … The day certainly has become a bit controversial. There are many for whom it brings mostly heartache–those who have lost mothers, and grandmothers, those who have toxic mother-child relationships, those mothers who have lost children and those women who want to be mothers and were never given the chance, for whatever reason.

Which does give me pause. Who am I to share photos and tell stories that might bring pain? Then again, I am in fact one of these people. Motherless eight years running, I’ve been grandmother-less since I was twenty-five. Of course losing one’s mother at age fifty-four isn’t the same as losing her as a child, or teen, or even a young adult, but a certain melancholy, a loneliness, sets in just the same.

Streets and shops and restaurants on Mother’s Day tend to be filled with “sandwich” women, their living mothers bedecked with corsages and leaning on their arms for support, their children in starched clothes tugging on their dresses and pants legs. The funny thing is, seeing these scenes warms my heart, not the opposite. Sure, when the mother-deprived among us scroll through the hundreds of tributes posted on social media from sons to mothers and mothers to daughters, every dog, cat, and fish to its surrogate mom, we may feel a twinge of pain. I do it anyway. Mostly, I smile. We’re a social species after all, one that thrives on emotion, uplifting and otherwise. Being alive hurts time to time, but maybe in the long run, we do well to open ourselves up to the whole messy shebang–the happy thoughts, the teary memories, the moments of joy and the ones we can’t help but resent, whether that resentment involves those who have what we don’t, or our very mothers themselves. I once was a sandwich mother myself. Though my sammy is now regretfully open-faced, I’m deeply grateful for my children, who fêted me with flowers and phone calls and a home cooked dinner.

Maybe it boils down to the obvious: If you’re on this Earth, whether old or young, you have or had a mother, and God knows it doesn’t take long to develop some mixed feelings towards that woman who made you eat Brussels sprouts and called you Sweetie in the school hallway. But even if she did her job poorly at times, she did what no one else could. She gave you your one particular life.

My late mother, Sara Elizabeth Lee Mattingly, was born in 1919, the year the dial telephone was introduced and WWI drew to a close. J. D. Salinger was a 1919-er, too, along with Eva Gabor, whom Mom found silly, Nat King Cole, too, whose music she loved, Jackie Robinson, whom she never gave the time of day, and Balto, the renowned sled dog. She outlived them all. Against all odds, she liked her chicken fried, her pound cake with a spoonful of heavy cream, her pancakes with a thick slice of real butter, and her nightly glass of Chardonnay full to the brim. She never took a vitamin or swallowed a drop of fish oil, and unless you count a few failed games of croquet, she spent not a single minute of her adult life engaged in organized exercise.

Clearly, Sara Lee had good genes. Her parents lived into their nineties, too. Still, I can’t help but think there was more to it than that. What was it about this lady (she was above all, a lady) that made her so resilient? Small but sturdy—5’2” with a playing weight of 106—she survived breast cancer at 81, a serious car accident at 83, the loss of her husband, a bad bout of pneumonia, and perhaps hardest of all, the death of her oldest son when she was 88. Tough as nails, her Hospice nurse called her, and a fighter, though at first glance she seemed anything but. In spite of a failing memory and the accumulation of sorrows that living long brings, my mother simply loved life. Even in her last difficult years, she clung to the remaining pleasures of her daily routine—a mug of coffee and a plate of eggs in the morning, a raucous visit from her great-grandchildren, a Saturday evening outing to Mass. Maybe this was my mother’s greatest legacy: You get up and out of your pajamas. You engage with whatever is left to you. You hope. These traits served her well. She hung on as long as a body could, only breathing her last at ninety-five when she couldn’t swallow enough, literally, to keep her little heart beating.

Eight years along, there are times I still wish I could spin back in time to accompany her, young and bored silly, to some dusty antique store, or to hear her sewing machine whirring away up the hall, or to have her over for dinner and keep my mouth shut as she critiques what I’ve prepared. I wish I could climb the steps of our old home to my room on a visit home and be greeted by a vase of hand-picked flowers. Her garden was undependable at best, but her seamstress fingers worked magic, arranging bits of greenery and simple blooms to create a thing of beauty.

Most of all, I wish my mother could meet my children’s babies, maybe give them a big ol’ squeeze.

Mother’s Day brings memories and feely-feels to us all. I hope this year at least some of yours were goody-good.

My mother adding the final touches to the dress I wore in my sister’s wedding, 1970