On A Motherless, Childless Mother's Day

The day is filled with signs of Mother's Day discounts--buy Mom a dozen flowers and get 50% off, FTD promises (doesn't this seem to miss some of the spirit?)--gigantic, overfattening, oversalted Mother's Day Buffets, and reminders that it's never too late to buy a silver-lined, grande-sized, sentiment-logged Hallmark card.

The day feels different for women who fall outside the "mother circle." I never had children although I became a stepmother to one (and a "step-stepmother" to my husband's stepson) in mid-life. Both were adults by then, however, so I never was called on to play "mommy." My stepson used to introduce me as "my Dad's chick." I took that as a compliment.

I am not truly motherless either, of course, not having sprung fully formed from Hera's head. Nor was I an adoptee, who rather than being motherless has two--a "birth" mother and an "adoptive" mother. But like many women my age, I have no living mother to celebrate with. My mother died last August--and before. After being the child closest to my mother--probably because I was the baby--the one who still went on trips with my parents into adulthood, the daughter she moved 500 miles to be with to help recover from anorexia, the one who always told her the truth about her petty envies and sometimes unkind treatment of my father, who would have worn chains for her, my mother slid into full dementia some years ago. My sister became the caretaker child and my heroine then because my parents had moved back to my hometown where my sister still lived. I saw my mother only sporadically.

The few times I did see her--with the exception of the last--were sad frustrations. Once she lay in a hospital bed after breaking her hip and never woke enough for me to know whether she would recognize me. A year later, she was awake and seemed to respond the first day I visited, laughing and holding out her hand to me, but by the next, she looked through me as though I was just another nurse coming into the room. The last time I saw her, though, was quite lovely. I was resigned to her not recognizing me, so that was no shock. And she had grown back to amazing physical health. She and my father, still adoring as ever, shared the same nursing home room and I was back for a family "party" for my father's birthday. Mother was sitting up in a chair, hair pulled back into a ponytail, fingernails painted a rosy pink by the staff, unaware of who most of us were but truly, giddily happy, laughing at any comment, watching the action closely, ooh-ing over the cake she wasn't able to eat. She didn't talk much and even less made sense but at one point she pointed to my brother and declared quite firmly, "I have just one thing to say to you. . ." Since that was as long a train of thought as she could hold, we had a grand, silly, just-like-old-family-times go-round of filling in the sentence for her: ". . .get a haircut."; ". . .finish your vegetables"(he's been a vegetarian for 40 years).

A few months later, her heart gave out. I didn't see her again.

And yet, that's not true. I have an amazingly beautiful photo of my mother and father on their wedding day: he was a pilot in WWII on leave in Virginia; she was a customer service rep in Pennsylvania. They met in college and had been in love for years, much to the dismay of both their mothers. An urban Jewish kid from Atlantic City, NJ and a country club debutante Episcopalian from Mt. Penn, PA were not supposed to fall in love in 1939. He wrote to her when he knew he was getting leave, asking her to get together $50 to match the $50 he had, and to elope with him in Roanoke. In the photo, Father in his officer's uniform, Mother in a lace-lapel suit, they were Hollywood stunning, a Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward combo.

And beyond that photo, my mother is with me in two more ways: one minor; one deeply inescapable. The one tangible item I inherited from her--the only one I wanted--is the minor one: her wedding band. The other I inherited from her as well: I look, not exactly like her, but so close that no one ever doubted whose daughter I was. I certainly never did and never will as long as there is a mirror to look into--and as long as I can recognize my own face.