I don’t hate Mother’s Day

I’m going to use Mother’s Day this year, first, to bemoan the lack of women in my life. Yes, most of my friends are women, but there is a threateningly large amount of testosterone in every other aspect of my life—my job, my living arrangement, my family, my “romantic inclinations.” Both my grandmothers died five years ago, and my mom died three years ago, and I’m not very close with any other female relatives, and I only see my therapist (a woman) every three or four weeks. I don’t understand how I got here.

No, I don’t hate Mother’s Day. But judging from the past few Mother’s Days, my body knows that it’s coming before my mind does—I just get sad when May starts. And when I lived in Park Slope, I was jealous of all the kids who had their Midwest moms in town, moms wearing their “city outfits” (Talbots or Ann Taylor, the Coldwater Creek left at home) with their “smart flats” (or tennis shoes!), all of which drew more attention to them than if they were to wear their usual clothes. Yeah, that’s what my Mom would have done. It’s cute. I looked forward to my Mom’s weekend visits from the day I moved here; I thought it would, first of all, be really fun (Fairway! Dinner parties! At my adorable apartment! Pilates! Powerwalking through the park!), but most of all I thought that showing her how much I love New York would be the easiest and clearest way of explaining myself to her (though I may have lifted this fantasy from a Michael Cunningham novel).

She never came alone to visit. The one time I did have time alone with her in the city, which was when my Dad was here for a work engagement—and incidentally this is my most vivid visual of her before she really got sick—was when she came to the Feminist Press to take me and Jess Roncker out to lunch. At the time, she had what the doctors thought was lupus and a resulting blood clot in her leg; that most vivid visual—what I think of when I try to remember what she last looked like before she got sick—is of her walking up the hall, beaming, with a limp. I don't mean at all to underestimate her, but it was the first time she was maneuvering though the city by herself and thus a pretty marvelous thing that she made it to and from the CUNY Graduate Center on her own.

Mother’s Day actually makes me sadder than any other reminders of her life—her birthday, the memorial of her death, other holidays. And it was never a holiday that my family or I celebrated with special finesse. Strangely, I’ve zeroed in on Mother’s Day as a kid’s opportunity to present him- or herself to his or her mom as an adult, and I worry sometimes that I never did that properly. Maybe this is the kind of thing one can only worry about after one loses a parent. And of course there are more important things to worry about.

But in other news, the Pam Plant, which I planted last summer on the memorial of her death over at the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, is absolutely thriving. There are lots of healthy looking flower buds. I'm going to go back out there tonight and get the rest of the weeds.