On Mother's Day

Some Incidents I Remember Involving My Mom

There’s no such thing as a reliable narrator, especially when the vehicle is memory. But if I believe it happened, then it happened, since the effects are real no matter what. Either way, my memories of my mother are always in the ether, and always pushing me forward or back, or stopping me cold. She has been dead for 25 years now, which is weird now that I hear it.

I am the oldest of three children. Our father died when I was not quite five, and my mother was 34. She never remarried. She died when I was a grown woman with a house and a job and a life. These are all important facts about me, and about her.

These are incidents I remember and can’t forget, and it goes without saying (but I am saying it) that remembering and not forgetting are two different things. One of these incidents shaped me, taught me empathy. One of them made me see how much like her I can be. One of them fills me with regret. And one of them cracks me up.

When I was six or seven, we were driving some distance to visit someone. I don’t remember who. I think my sister, who would have been two or three was with us, but I don’t think my brother, who was the middle child, was there. I could be wrong. See above. Maybe he was with our grandparents, who, according to my mother, would never take all of us at the same time, because they were afraid she would take off. I don’t think this is true, but that’s what she thought.

I was an unhappy and troubled child, or at least that’s what the nuns at our school complained to my mother, not really grasping the cloud that hangs over the household of a young mother of three children under five whose husband unexpectedly drops dead in the middle of a softball game. (More on them another time, and it won’t be pleasant.)

On this trip, in the car, I wet myself. I don’t know why. This wasn’t something I did with any regularity at that age. My mother was a little bit beside herself. I don’t remember where we were going. Likely we were visiting someone from whom she needed some help, and we needed to be presentable, which I no longer was. We pulled off the highway and went into a department store to get clean pants for me. We picked them out and went to the dressing room where she put them on me. Then, holding my sister, she took me by the hand and we walked right out of the store. I looked at her as we were walking out the door and she was looking straight ahead, walking briskly, and in that moment, I understood that she didn’t have the money to buy me pants. Thinking about it later, as an adult, older than she was at the time, I was struck by how that was a microcosm of her whole life at that moment. Look ahead. Don’t think about it. She must have been terrified.

Later, when I was probably 12 or 13, she bought me exactly what I wanted for my birthday: a tape recorder. I wanted it so I could tape “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Sundown,” and “Come and Get Your Love” off of WRKO or WMEX. I did something fresh; I don’t remember what, but am sure it was awful. I could be mean. We were fighting, yelling at each other, and it was escalating. I was at one end of the long hallway in our apartment, headed out the front door, and she was at the other end of the hall. I went to open the door. She roared that I better not open it. And I replied something along the lines of “Oh yeah? What are you gonna do?” She reached around to the kitchen counter, where I had left my tape recorder, and she lifted it high in the air and calmly said, “I will smash it.” I looked at her full of anger and hate and said, “Go ahead.” So she did. I showed her, didn’t I?

This one is difficult to write. I bought a house in the early 90’s, and ran a business from there, with employees and lots of visitors. It was a chaotic hive. My house was on my mother’s way from her house to her job, and she used to like to stop by unannounced to visit. It was disruptive. I dealt with it for a while, but she showed up once on a day that was particularly crazy, and I was experiencing some stress, juggling a few people and getting ready to go on a trip. She asked me to sit and have coffee, and I snapped. I told her I couldn’t. I had to work. I didn’t stop there, where I should have. I told her I would never just show up at her place of work and expect her to drop everything and visit. I told her she had to call before she came by. She was crestfallen. I was an asshole. We got through it, and I apologized. I had my shot at redemption, when she got sick a few years later and I was her thrice-weekly ride to Dana Farber for platelet infusions, on what we dubbed “Yvonne and Joyce’s Less-Than-Excellent Adventure.” But this might be the memory of her that most often visits me. Let this be a cautionary tale if your Mom is still around and can be as big a pain in the ass as mine could.

My memories of her now exist in vignettes, and a lot of them are very funny. We may have known how to fight, but we also knew how to laugh. I’ll end with a story I like to tell adult friends who have just lost their mothers, at the wake if possible. My mother was kind of vain. She loved nice clothes, and though she never had the money for haute couture, could sniff out a quality piece at a thrift store like nobody’s business. The thought of her hair turning grey traumatized her. When she was in her teens, she got some kind of terrible gum disease, lost all of her teeth, and was forced to wear dentures all her life. She told me as soon as she delivered her babies, she asked the nurse for her teeth so she could put them back in before she even asked to hold us.

She died of leukemia and didn’t look her best in the end. I brought her nicest dress to the funeral home. But we knew there was no way she’d want an open casket, so we closed it and perched the photo below on top for the wake. After her funeral, I returned to her house to get some papers from her bedroom, and I looked at her bedside table. “OH FUCK,” I yelled to no one. There were her teeth. I had neglected to give them to the undertaker so she could be buried with them in her mouth. I have no doubt that she will come back to haunt me one day for that mistake.

I hope those of you who are experiencing Mother’s Day without a Mom are doing okay. I know the onslaught can be hard to take. I decided to cook this year, and invite some friends whose mothers are also gone. I promised them it won’t be sad. I’ll tell them the denture story.

-          JL, Mother’s Day 2024

Thank you for reading. You might also like to check out my other Substack, where I write about music.