HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY 2011

I have to write about my mother on Mother’s Day. This is the second year she hasn’t been around for the event. Last year I wrote an appreciation of her in Cooking Light magazine and I got a lot of wonderful comments on the piece. But there are parts of my mother that just wouldn’t fly in a national magazine. For instance, I couldn’t have said what her oft-repeated quote about this Hallmark holiday was, and it went like this: “ I hate fucking Mother’s Day. And P.S. don’t buy me anything. I don’t want any more stuff!” Really, seriously, that was my mom verbatim.

Natalie Roth Meyers was not a women of tepid opinion. She screamed at the television set often. When people spoke grammatically incorrectly she was personally offended. If a sports announcer said something stupid she went into a tirade that would have made David Mamet swoon. In college some preppy guy commented on my propensity to use four letter words and said : “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” And to this I replied: “Where do you think I learned it, asshole?”

So my mother’s virulent anti-Mother’s Day stance frees me from the sentimentality that I’m sure a lot of people who have lost their mothers would feel on such a day. I still think about my mom on Mother’s Day and every other day. I’m thankful that she was a woman of huge heart and brilliant mind, but the missing doesn’t go away. The tears that come also have joy. There is joy that my mom was funny and fiery and did not suffer fools. As a kid I was sometimes embarrassed by her directness, her in-your-face willingness to call things as she saw them. I see now as an adult that by doing this, she gave me permission to do the same. To stand up, to say my piece, to ask for what I needed and if a bit of colorful language here and there served to strengthen a point, well then my all means.

If I had one more day with my mom it would be spent holding and loving and laughing, listening to great music and having something yummy brought in —probably Mineo’s pizza and Diet Coke with lots of ice— so we wouldn’t have to spend time cooking or cleaning up. There might be some poetry included and if luck was with us a Steelers game would be on. My brother Muzz tells me she’s here with me and in many ways I know that to be true. I hear her voice in my head. I know when she’d approve and not approve. I know she’d laugh at me losing my patience at the exact same things she had lost her patience over. Take shopping. I used to walk into a store with my mother and within seconds want to join the Witness Protection Program. It would always begin the same way. We’d enter and some sweet sales girl would walk up to us all cheery and chirpy and ask if she could help us with anything and my mother would immediately answer in a direct attack.” If you want me to spend my money in this store you are going to have to turn the music down,” she’d say. As if tasered, the young employee would back away mumbling. I feel my mom’s anger every time I make the mistake of walking my girls into the dimly-lit, music-blaring Hollister in our nearby mall. I don’t attack, though, I usually just turn around, and tell the girls I’ll wait outside, praying that they won’t need me to come in and pay for something.

My oldest daughter, Annie, has her learner’s permit this year. After one particularly fraught ride into town she told me the thing that makes her most nervous when she drives is how I hold onto the car handle above my right shoulder for dear life. I laughed hard when she offered that up because my mother did the exact same thing. I don’t know if my mom was ever was comfortable with my driving and I’m afraid that my daughter and I may share the same fate. I realize now that it had little to do with my road skills and everything to do with the powerlessness you feel over your children in the world and how acutely that hits you when they are behind the wheel of a large automobile.

Last week I had a bit of a crying time thinking about my mom and a friend stopped by mid-cry. She is a very sweet, very well-meaning friend who was very serious about explaining to me that she communicated with people who are no longer living. (You have to remember, I live in Boulder, Co.) So on this day my friend who speaks to the dead mentioned that my mother was talking to her and started telling me what my mother was “saying.” I know my friend was trying to cheer me up and I didn’t get mad at her when she proceeded to say all these sweet things that a mother would say.

Secretly though, I couldn’t wait to call my fiancée and tell him what I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend, and that is that my mother would NEVER have said those things. She didn’t talk that way. She was not a person to speak in vapid pleasantries or spew out stuff that you’d see in needlepoint somewhere. My mother found subtlety difficult and though she was often incredibly kind and loving to me, there was no syrup to it. So I’m thinking that what my mother would have said was this: “If I can communicate with the living , why the FUCK would I be talking to YOU when I could just speak with my daughter directly?!”

And yes, my mother would have told me she loved me and she was proud of me and she also would have insisted that I stop being sad and just go and enjoy my life. She would have used the line she always used when I needed a kick in the ass: “Enough of your self pity, Max.” I dreaded that line because it was always true. Nobody wants to hear words like that, which is why mothers have to say them. As the mom of two teenagers, I now know how hard that is to do, and I love her even more for it.

So today, in my mom’s honor, there will be no tears and no self-pity, Max. I’m thinking a good dose of Nina Simone, a glass of red, some meatloaf, a glob of mashed potatoes and a few choice words: “Happy Fucking Mother’s Day.”