Bonus: Mother's Day

In which life changes for the better.

From Elise, age 6

I have hated Mother’s Day pretty much since I became a mom. On my first Mother’s Day, Vee was just a few weeks old, and I was in the middle of preparing for my final law school exams. I literally do not remember a thing about the day.

The next year, everything went to hell. My mom had just been diagnosed with leukemia, and I was sitting with her in the hospital, when the news arrived that my beloved former student, Jaewon, who I taught for three years in first, third, and fourth grades, had been murdered - shot to death at 14 by a gang initiate trying to prove himself by killing a random kid he happened to encounter. Jaewon was killed in broad daylight, while on his way to buy Mother’s Day gifts for his mom and grandma. I cannot describe the feeling of being eviscerated by grief, but unable to hug my mom because she was too medically fragile to touch anyone. That was Mother’s Day #2.

On my third Mother’s Day, my mom was in her final weeks, and everything was pain. There is nothing more I can say than that. Then, all the years following, Mother’s Day just hurt. It hurt for various reasons, at varying intensities, but the misery was there every year, like clockwork. And in an especially bitter irony, every damned year I found myself knocked flat by the anguish of missing my mom, even though my mom hated Mother’s Day and refused to celebrate it. Apparently, the crueler Fates were messing with me, and it worked.

From Annie, age 9

But then, this year, something changed. It is my first Mother’s Day as a single mom, and it has followed a year of tremendous hardship, but a year of exquisite beauty and kindness as well. And so, although it was Michael’s weekend with the girls, he gave up his morning with them, and we enjoyed a perfect ramble in Rock Creek Park, followed by lunch. Meanwhile, throughout the day, so many beautiful, kind people reached out to send me love and support, and every single gesture came swooping in like a blessing.

Finally, after a day that abounded with joy, as I drove to pick up Vee for a solo night together (every Sunday night one of the girls gets an overnight with the parent who isn’t with them that weekend), I suddenly realized that I felt happy - really happy! - and that my heart was light. And it felt miraculous.

And so, I finally believe that Mother’s Day can be redeemed. It will never be my favorite day, but I can at least rewrite it as a fine day, a day where sweetness may fall into my world in lovely and surprising ways. And isn’t that a marvelous thing, for life to change for the better?

In his tenth Duino elegy, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

Yet if these
endlessly dead
awakened a simile for us

look, they might point
to the catkins
hanging from empty hazeltrees

or else they might mean the rain
that falls on the dark earth
in spring.

And we
who always think
of happiness rising

would feel the emotion
that almost startles us
when a happy thing falls.

And so, may happiness fall too on all of you who are mothering - in every broad and beautiful sense of the word mother - today and every day. I see you, you are amazing, carry on...

From Vee, age 12