Mother’s Day… eh

mother and first-born, 1946

It’s Mother’s Day.

I’m awake.

I just opened the exquisitely perfect gift my daughter sent me which I have kept right next to my bed for days now, looking forward to treasuring the undeserved love I get from her. I will not hear from my son because I have not heard from my son in years. I guess it’s his cosmic duty to be the reminder of what I crap mother I was.

I was bound to be a crap mother. I had a crap mother. It’s not just that she lacked mothering skills, which she indeed, did, it’s more that she lacked common decency as a mother, selling me out to her never-satisfied husband and father. As a professional person she was at the top of her field, world famous, in fact, but as a mother… well…. not so much.

I am not crying as I write but, one by one, at their own pace, tears roll down my cheeks. I’m 75 with a shit-ton of therapy under my belt so you might think I’d be over this by now but my own not-as-bad-as-my-mother but bad-enough to have given up custody of my children without a fight haunts me always… not just on Mother’s Day… every damn day.

So, No Thank-you Anna Jarvis, from the very city in which I was born and in which I grew up, for coming up with this priceless gem of a heart-breaker. May you rest in peace. I know I’m look forward to doing that. To paraphrase Wordsworth, “The world is too much with me.”