brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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This Mother’s Day, for the first time in nearly a decade, I’ll spend the day with all three of my children. That hasn’t happened since my oldest daughter left for college in 2009. We’ll be in my hometown of Amherst, Mass., for the graduation of two of my nephews from the University of Massachusetts. I’d be happy to spend any day with my children and husband; Mother’s Day is just a bonus. But it’s not my favorite holiday. Don’t get me wrong — I love being a mother. There’s literally nothing I love more. But I don’t need a day set aside to feel appreciated. That’s what birthdays are for. And besides, children appreciate their mothers 24/7, 365 days a year, don’t they? The best Mother’s Days were when the kids were small and brought home handmade cards and art projects from school. I loved the spindly plants and wobbly ceramic bowls and crafts made from milk cartons or Popsicle sticks or cardboard paper towel rolls. I treasured the hand-written, painstaking messages on those cards with the creative spelling and backwards letters. “My mom dose lots of landry,” my son wrote one year. (I was touched he noticed.) But these days, Mother’s Day makes me feel a bit nostalgic. While I’ll always be a mother to my children, even when they’re leading fully independent lives and raising their own families, I view most of my mothering days now through the rearview mirror. Stretched out for miles are those family dinners, Sunday breakfasts, bedtime stories, school projects, sleepovers, play dates, birthday parties, sporting events, road trips, picnics at the park, summer weeks on Cape Cod and visits with friends and relatives, all fading from view on the road behind me. Even farther from view are my days as a child growing up under the loving gaze of my own mother, gone nearly three years now. In my mind she’s not the 90-year-old she was at her death, but a woman of some indeterminate age — likely somewhere around my own — correcting English papers at her rolltop desk in the living room, listening to “All Things Considered” on NPR while cooking dinner or sitting on the back terrace, legs crossed, reading the New York Times. She believed breakfast was the most important meal of the day and there was nothing a good night’s sleep or fresh air and sunshine couldn’t fix. Each morning she woke us with a chipper “Rise and shine!” and snap of the window shades in our bedrooms, followed by a balanced breakfast around the kitchen table. Sleeping in or skipping breakfast was not an option. Her motto for a life devoid of regret was, “When in doubt, do.” She was proud of her Scotch-Irish heritage, her upbringing as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, her years teaching English to middle school students — an age she felt children still could be molded — and, perhaps most of all, her ease in raising the five of us, whether she was shepherding us into a pew at church — usually late — or herding us around Europe during one of our father’s quixotic quests. She was the practical foil to his romanticism in an enduring partnership that kept us grounded while not tethering our poet father’s dreams. My mother’s unflagging optimism may have masked some darker moments, especially after the death of her husband of nearly 60 years, but it served her well through her final moments on earth. Family friends who visited her before she died claim she replied, when they asked on their way out if she wanted the TV on to keep her company, “No, I think I’ll just lie here with my eyes closed and think about what a wonderful life I've had.” I hope to pay tribute to that life this Mother’s Day when I visit my parents’ grave sites along the grassy knoll in the wooded cemetery near my childhood home. My siblings and their spouses and children will be there with me, along with my own husband and children. It’ll be too late for a card or flowers or even a phone call to tell them how much we loved them. But it won’t matter. We’ll do what we always do when we get together. Tell stories. Laugh. Recite one of my father’s poems. Sing a song. Laugh some more. And they'll know.
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |