My mother hated Mother’s Day.
As a woman born in 1927 who did not marry until her early 30s, my mother lived with my grandmother her entire life. Not long after my parents married, doctors diagnosed my grandmother with leukemia. She died in March 1960, a couple weeks after Noreen was born, but was never able to see her or any of her grandchildren.
Mother’s Day magnified mom’s usual outspoken and opinionated personality into a raging banshee of raw emotions – and all of them negative. No matter what anyone did, it was wrong. Cooked her breakfast in bed? Don’t you know by now that she doesn’t eat breakfast and never eats anything in the bedroom? Thought you would learn from experience and skip breakfast? “I guess your cousins loved their mother. They woke woke early and made your aunt breakfast. In bed, no less.”
Damned if you did. Damned if you didn’t.
When I was five or six years old, my sister Sandy and I trooped down to the florist on Potomac Avenue to get mom a Mother’s Day corsage. We had not called in advance so we had to wait while the florist crafted the perfect gift for her to wear in church the next morning: a lovely corsage of red carnations. By the time we finally walked home, we were sweaty, tired, and about half an hour late for dinner, violating the Prime Directive of the household. With the timetable of Mussolini’s trains, the Wachter family ate dinner at 5 pm sharp each night.
“Don’t you know dinner is at 5 o’clock in this house!?!!” That was my dad.
Mother’s Day Eve. Even dad was on edge.
Sandy is five years older than me so she conjured up some tears in the backyard into the house. She’s the middle child – Jan Brady. The tears rarely worked but that never stopped her.
“We wanted to get you flowers to wear to church tomorrow…”
“I hope they’re white. You know your grandmother’s dead.”
Sandy’s tears rose to full ugly-cry sobbing which I used as cover to sneak out of the kitchen to duck under the radar. Dinner was ruined.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Your mother was a real piece of work! How could she expect her 11- and six-year-old children to know the obscure rituals and proper flower colors for various holiday? White? Red? Who cares?
Well, you’re wrong, because mom was one of the all-time greats – like, give the Virgin Mary a run for her money great. Perhaps in the top five best. At least top ten.
One of my earliest memories is my fourth birthday. Always the pop culture devotee, I wanted a Peanuts cake – not the legume, the Charles Schultz characters. Specifically, I loved Charlie Brown. On the day of my birthday, the cake came back from Kriebel’s Bakery along with a box of delicious jimmy donuts. The cake decorators outdid themselves, with lots of sugary roses and a blue Snoopy drawn on the cake in buttercream. Mom knew the bakery’s mistakes as she opened the box. First, Snoopy is not Charlie Brown and, second, my favorite color was yellow.
The mixer was whirling up a small batch of frosting as I walked into the kitchen. “Mommy will fix it,” she comforted as she squeezed drops of food coloring into the mixing bowl. That evening, the cake bore her wobbly freehand drawing of Charlie Brown in yellow icing.
She dedicated her life to her kids and was our homeroom mother all through elementary school. She dressed as the Cowardly Lion for Halloween and gave a “Yes, Hillsdale School, there is a Santa Claus” speech when someone’s older brother spilled the tea on the bearded one. The next year, she made sure Noreen told me the truth while she cried in the kitchen.
She chauffeured field trips. Shuffled commitments on boards and committees. Chaperoned the prom. She baked hundreds, if not thousands, of cookies for various family weddings. (You haven’t lived until you’ve attended a wedding with a “cookie table.”) A wedding wasn’t a wedding without Mary Wachter’s peach cookies.
I was in high school when we finally had the Great Mother’s Day Intervention with my mom. A week or so before Mother’s Day, we asked her if she just wanted to skip the holiday that year because it it was so hard on her. She looked at each of us and said, “One of these days you’ll understand why I don’t like Mother’s Day.”
BAM! Who knew that merely expressing the root of the problem could have such an impact? From that year on, we empathized with mom’s feelings and allowed any emotional outbursts to roll of our backs. And the incidents dwindled as she realized we were trying to understand her situation and meet her where she was, as it were.
In September 1993, mom’s lung cancer returned. The doctors presented a dire prognosis; removal of one lung four years earlier made surgery impossible. No one expected her to leave the hospital.
Mom had other plans: cookie baking. My cousin Cindy, Sandy’s sister-in-law, and one of mom’s best friends’ son all planned their weddings in May. Mom announced her intention to celebrate all three weddings and bake cookies for each one. The last wedding was on May 14, 1994.
Two weeks after Mother’s Day.
Mother’s Day does not tread so lightly on many people. Some of us have lost our mothers (and, yes, we looked behind the couch) which makes the day all the more painful. Our church did not do the traditional “Breakfast for Mom” after Mass. We were raised Byzantine Catholic, which meant a panachida, or memorial service, was chanted and ever deceased mother’s name was memorialized aloud. Three times. Afterwards, we visited grandpa and then decorated graves at the cemeteries. Fun times – especially for mom.
Others may have worse situations. Mothers of deceased children. Mothers and children with damaged relationships. Mothers who gave up their children for adoption. Women who cannot have children. Children of abusive mothers. Transgender men who were formerly mothers and transgender women who were formerly fathers. Adoptive mothers. Step mothers.
It is not a good day for them.
The American version of Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis held a memorial service for her deceased mother and all mothers. She meant well. Honoring mothers. What can go wrong with that? Well, Anna obviously did not take into account how a lovely commemoration of inspirational women can be co-opted into the Hallmark Holiday™ it has become. As years went by, Anna derided the efforts of card companies, candy manufacturers, and other retailers to commercialize the holiday.
“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”
Anna Jarvis, founder of Mother’s Day in the United States
In particular, she railed against commodification of her chosen symbol of Mother’s Day, the white carnation which selected to represent “the truth, purity and broad-charity of mother love; its fragrance, her memory, and her prayers.” As the holiday’s popularity increased in the 1920s, florists inflated the price of white carnations and eventual adding red carnations to meet consumer demand. They soon changed the meaning of the flower from it original symbolism to the living mother (red)/deceased mother (white) categorization that tripped up Sandy and me decades later.
A fan of symbols, Anna Jarvis started petitions to fight the commercialism of the holiday she created. According to historians at the Anna Jarvis Museum in Grafton, West Virginia, this did not go as she planned.
“By 1943, she had become so distraught over the fact that she couldn’t seem to stop any of the commercialization, so she decided to get a petition together to rescind Mother’s Day. But they placed her in the Marshall Square Sanitarium instead. And they put her there – and you wonder who paid the bill? Card and florist people paid the bill to keep her there.”
Olive Ricketts, Executive Director, Anna Jarvis Museum
While mom’s behavior may have been a bit over the top, we never institutionalized her for it.
Try as I might, I cannot avoid Mother’s Day. Advertising. Store displays. Blast emails from every imaginable retailer. It’s omnipresent. I know many people who choose not to leave the house that day so they are not inundated by the various trappings of the holiday. Personally, I start avoiding the greeting card section of big box and grocery store in April. Mom loved receiving cards. My sister issued a fatwa against cards one year only to be shot down by mom. “I’d rather get a card than a gift,” she’d claim. Trust me, Hallmark had no plans to put my mother in an institution. There would be no prohibition on cards in our family.
I still have the Christmas card from mom when she knew it was the last one she would write to me. I treasure it. Maybe Anna Jarvis was wrong about Hallmark…
At the end of the day, mom wore the red carnations on that Mother’s Day years ago. People knew her mother was deceased and the color did not match the custom.
And, when asked why her corsage wasn’t white, she answered, “Because my kids thought this was pretty.”
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom…
Birds on Sticks 