Mother's Day 2025

Mother’s Day has me thinking, as it always does, as it is probably supposed to, of my mother. I’ve written before of how sorry I am that all our father ever trained us (her four children) to give her was flats of pansies for her to plant! 

Once I became a mother myself, I realized that was not an appropriate expression of gratitude and love for a Mom, any Mom, and especially not mine. But I don’t think I ever did much better, because, well, because it was so hard to express appreciation and love to my mother. She didn’t seem to place much stock in emotions of any kind. 

I’ve spent a fair amount of my adult life regretting my inability to forge any kind of emotional bond with her or, more often, blaming her for her failure to forge an emotional bond with me. I nursed that sense of loss and felt that she never really knew me, (which was, to be honest, a foreign concept to me during her lifetime). More recently, as I try to nurture the emotional bonds I think I have with my children, I have started to realize that I didn’t really know her, either, and probably never gave it a thought. She was Mom. I was Daughter. And we both played our roles very well and didn’t expect, or even know to expect anything more. 

And yet, now, I am presuming that my adult children want more — at least to be seen more fully — but maybe I’m projecting, maybe it’s only that I would like to be seen more fully myself. Or at least not reduced to the performance of my duties as mother and grandmother. When my husband retired from his law practice, the children feted him with a congratulatory dinner and a fun gift of T-shirts from each of the myriad educational institutions his earnings had so generously provided for them to attend. They also penned a tribute to me, calculating all the meals I had prepared, all the carpools I had driven, all the athletic event and piano recitals I had attended, etc. The kids were clever, and thoughtful, and, at the time, I thought it was all very nice, and actually rather impressive . 

These days, however, neither of us wants to be a mere line on a ledger; our parenting has meant so much more to us. And our love for these amazing people our children have become — independent of us — cannot be contained in an accounting of tuitions or tasks. So what, then? It’s not as if we don’t all love one another. Very much. Everyone makes the effort to get together; everyone knows how to have a good time; everyone honors and celebrates holidays and birthdays and achievements and the grandchildren; everyone remembers to call. 

They know I drink tea all day long and enjoy white wine and love to read and write and am distraught about our politics and the dangerous world they are inheriting. What they don’t know is that I feel stuck in a role, performing for them as the mother and grandmother I think I should be and I think they expect. Just as I imagine they feel stuck — and maybe more than a bit resentful — in a role performing for me. 

It pains me to admit that the antidote to this “stuck-ness”is probably trust. Trust that I can be be more emotionally honest with them, that they will still accept. — and love — me when I am not just the winning actor in a supporting role. In turn I need to earn their trust by practicing what a therapist calls “radical acceptance" of who they are and what they do. 

The good news is that I have the time and the motivation to work on this. There is a risk, of course, that I am trying to have my children fill a need my mother couldn’t, and didn’t, and that would be neither fair nor healthy. I won’t ask this of them; I have my own judgmental self to work on and my own voice to find. 

Selfishly, I think, both will make some of these next life stages easier to navigate. If, for example, I don’t hear only criticism in their suggestions about the choices we must make as we age, but know that they recognize my needs and fears as much as I discern theirs, the requisite transitions should go more smoothly. 

And, should I get any good at this radical acceptance stuff, even if it doesn’t go so smoothly, we will all be okay. I wonder, I really do, if my mother ever thought about any of this. 

Rest in peace, Mom.