This will be my sixth year as a mother, and still Mother’s Day has never felt like my day. Since 1994, the year my mother died of liver cancer, I have dreaded a holiday that used to be my favorite.
Weeks before Mother’s Day, my brother and I would start planning an elaborate multi-media handmade card, which always had to be bigger and better than the year before. We wrote poems, stitched quilts, painted watercolors, crafted origami…all hosed with plenty of glitter.
Mom made things extra difficult for us because she couldn’t wait until Mother’s Day to see what we were up to. She enjoyed sneaking up on us and trying to get a peek. And if she succeeded, then I would insist on starting a new project, even if it was the night before Mother’s Day.
When my dad begged us to stop this ridiculous game, both my mother and I simply said, “We can’t help it.”
Mother’s Day was not only an artistic challenge with a splash of espionage but the one day my mother let me pamper her, while she made the other 364 days of the year an exciting adventure. On a weekday, she might pick us up from school and drive us straight to a movie theatre where we watched two or three films in a row and feasted on buttered popcorn and hotdogs for dinner. On summer break, while Dad dozed in the passenger seat, she might drive super-duper-fast on bumpy dirt roads.
She held herself to a standard painted on a wood plaque in our kitchen:
I hope my children will look back on today
And see a mother who had time to play.
There will be years for cleaning and cooking
But children grow up while we’re not looking.
She also had a way of showing up when I was in distress, as if an invisible Bat-Signal alerted her whenever I needed rescuing. When I was in college and my brother was battling cancer, I remember once waiting for the elevator to arrive and tears welling up in my eyes because a mean boss had just chewed me out. Just when I was about to give up on the elevator, the doors had opened slowly and my mother and brother stepped out, wiped away my tears, and told me to quit instantly.
I think what makes Mother’s Day tough on me now is the magnifying lens I hold over my own parenting. I wonder how my kids will see me.
I worry that they see a mom that cries all the time. Even my two-year-old has started to ask, “Mommee, are you sad?” He would rush over and kiss me on the nose and ask, “Feel better?”
I worry that they see a workaholic. My five-year-old said to me the other day, “Mommee, you go work on computer and we will watch T.V., okay?”
I worry that they might prefer an hour with the iPhone over an hour with me?
Sure, there are days when I take them on adventures like dog mushing and snowboarding, but are they enough to counterbalance the days I rely on technology to educate them?
And then I feel even worse that I recognize these faults and haven’t had time to do anything about it.
I wonder when Mother’s Day will stop reminding me of all the ways I have failed to be the mother I had. When I look through all those handmade Mother’s Day cards she had saved, I noticed how many times I raved about how this was my “most favorite” day. Maybe, I won’t start enjoying Mother’s Day until my children write me a card with that sentiment.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they will ever feel this way until I achieve mom’s standard of being the kind of mother who had time to play, a challenge made more difficult by technologies like iPhone apps, iPads, Kinect, and the Wii.
How do you compete with these technologies to be a mother who had time to play?
