dual personalities

Another week has flown by and we all feel as beleaguered as the poor daffodils and just-sprouting peonies in this photo:

Snow in May isn’t that unusual, but given our current circumstances, it feels a little punitive. Governor Cuomo’s lock-down continues…

Since tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking about how many women experience the day as mothers and daughters simultaneously. Tomorrow, I will talk to my wonderful sons and reminisce about their childhoods, but I will also remember my own mother, as indeed I do every day.

As I prepared to write this post and looked for an appropriate photo of our mother, I realized that I do not have many. Back in ‘our day’, photos belonged to special occasions; we could not record every moment of our daily lives, and the fact that our mother usually acted as photographer reduced her appearance in photos even more. She did not like to have her picture taken. Here’s a cropped photo from a Christmas in the early 1960s.

You see my DP’s leg in the bottom right among the wrapping paper. That was the year my parents gave our brother a toy bazooka that shot large, blue plastic missiles. I don’t suppose they anticipated that he’d use his sisters as targets. Those bazooka shells hurt! In the photo, taken before a weapon has been fired, our Mother looks happy and relaxed. All hell will break loose once she heads to the kitchen to make Christmas dinner. Despite the brotherly rambunctiousness and sisterly tears, it was a nearly perfect Christmas.

Recently, I came across John Steinbeck’s description of Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath and I remembered that my DP had quoted it previously  as another Mother’s Day approached. I think it’s worth including again:

“Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work… She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”

We all depended on Mother — maybe a little too much — and we miss her daily. Happy Mother’s Day to all of you, whether you are celebrating your mother, busy being one, or about to become one!

*Robert Louis Stevenson, “To My Mother”: