A Mother’s Day tribute
I tend to think that these minor, dare I say manufactured, holidays–Valentine’s Day, Mother’s and Father’s Days–are pretty arbitrary. Did I send my mom flowers this weekend? Of course I did, and I’m glad that there is a reminder on the calendar that I should do something like that. Mother’s Day could be any weekend, though, so it might as well be this weekend.
But, arbitrary or no, I am really, really, especially missing my grandmother today. Maybe it’s that Mother’s Day season makes other people talk about their grandmothers and me realize that I don’t have any. It’s a kind of loneliness in the abstract, but lonely nonetheless.
I know that grief is supposed to be all about the person who is lost, but I think that, if we’re honest, our emotions are basically about ourselves. In losing my grandmother this November, I lost someone who adored and accepted me unconditionally. She was not well-educated, and I know she didn’t understand why I do a lot of things that I do (more school?) and that my priorities were always a mystery to her (why aren’t you buying a house in Maine like your cousins?), but she loved me. And something more. She liked me, too. My stories, of my students, of cities I’ve lived in, of things I’ve seen and done, have been all the more special and alive because I know how much they delighted her.
She was a person who said she liked things and people and ideas to be the way they had always been. She liked a meat and potatoes diet, and ideologically, she was Greatest Generation to the bone. But she was fundamentally not judgmental, and she trusted me. She would say that she didn’t like exotic anything, but when she heard me rustling around in the kitchen, preparing one of my one-of-a-kind specialties with a lot of ingredients, she never balked, even when I was making a curry, which she normally would have claimed was too spicy. Invariably, she would say something like, “Well, this is nice for something different.” I know I’m a pretty good cook, but that is still the praise that means the most. To see an 80-something year-old woman who thinks she only likes beans and hotdogs ask for a second helping of my mulligatawny soup is a kind of subtle satisfaction that I will never forget.
But the way she trusted me at the table is maybe a symbol for everything else. She really listened to me when I talked. She wasn’t necessarily inclined to support something like gay marriage, or to see why we should give amnesty to illegal immigrants, but where I stood on subjects like that had a lot of weight. I would sit on the loveseat with my legs tucked under me and explain why I see the world the way I do, and she would sit in her recliner and listen and say, “Well, that’s true, too.” And, in the end, her kindness and basic love for and interest in people always won out. Being kind wasn’t a political thing to her at all, it was an instinct.
It certainly wasn’t all a matter of me teaching her things. I learned countless things from her. That if you tie a bow what seems like upside down, it won’t come out crooked. That you should always tip the bartender. That it’s easier to peel a banana from the end opposite the stem and it’s easier to get to the tail meat of a lobster if you crack the shell lengthwise first. That I should hold out for the right guy. That you should know how to iron, even if you never do. That it isn’t possible to have nothing in common with your family because being family is everything. I’m better, and my life is richer, because I know these things.
So…thank you, Grammie. Happy Mother’s Day.
When we were out somewhere, Betty would often say to me, “Go ahead. Say that thing you say.” I’d play dumb: “What thing is that?” “You know,” she would say. And I would say it. “There may be somebody somewhere with a better mother-in-law than I have, but I never met him.” Betty is gone now, and I still haven’t met anyone with a better mother-in-law.