I'm My Mother

I found myself pacing. Back and forth I marched in front of the window, peering down the street, checking the clock, making sure cell phone ringer was on. The Love Muffin was late for dinner, as usual. Normally, I would let the food burn and prepare a statement regarding his, choose one: disrespectfulness, selfishness, tardiness, soon-to-be ex status, or disregard for the importance of pasta al dente. But this day, all I could do was imagine that something horrible had happened -- a car accident, an abduction, another woman -- and it struck me like a fertilizer bomb that my worst fear had come true. I was turning into my mother.

I shook my head and did a little exorcism dance. “Mother go, mother go,” I said as I ran around the house shaking my legs. That occupied me for a good 15 minutes, by which time he had arrived with some pitiful excuse about losing his car keys.

“Am I turning into my mother?” I asked wild-eyed.

“Did you think I was dead?” he said, dipping his forefinger into my homemade sauce.

“I thought something terrible happened,” I said, throwing my arms around him.

“It’s happened,” he said and patted me on the head. “It happens to all of you, eventually.”

I hated him for saying it, but I know the truth when I hear it. At a certain age, whether we’ve had children yet or not, we women start the transformation. Mine began when I was just out of college and found my live-in boyfriend‘s journal lying on the floor. I never forgave my mother for reading my private diary as a child, but she said she just couldn’t help it, she had to know what her only daughter really thought of her and she knew it was locked up in that pink-and-orange flowered diary that said “Keep Out” all over it.

She found the key and read the words all 12-year-old girls have thought at one time or another: “I hate my mother. She’s a witch.” There was hysteria in the house that day and all I could think of was that nothing was sacred, that I had no privacy, that my mother had taken from me my most cherished possession, my own private thoughts. I vowed that I would never read anyone’s diary, personal letters, credit card statements, etc., but there it was, leather-bound and full of answers, peeking out of the top drawer of his desk.

When all was said and done, it didn’t matter that what I read was a confession of the unfaithful sort, a plot to dump me so he could run off with some beautiful but alcoholic floozy. “I can’t believe you read my journal,” he said as I threw his belongings out the window. “You’re just like your mother.” This was the unkindest cut of all. From which there was no recovery.

It doesn’t seem fair that mothers get such a bad rap. They suffer through so much. Pregnancy, birth, childhood accidents, and diseases, watching us make mistakes, fail, get rejected, watching their hopes dashed when we drop out of law school to become musicians, yoga instructors, poets. They watch us grow and move away, form our own families with spouses who inevitably will hate them. They live with the knowledge, that, given a chance to do it over again, they could have been a better mom. I think about how difficult it must be to be O.J. Simpson’s mother, or Timothy McVeigh’s mother, or Susan Smith’s mother, everyone wondering if it was her fault, if she did something to her kid to make him or her full of violence and rage.

Mothers blame themselves for everything, like my mother, who blamed herself for me not being married yet. “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she asked me at least once a month when I told her once again that no, there’s been no talk of tying the knot with the Love Muffin. "Where did I go wrong?” she said sounding exactly like her own mother, as if she really wanted me to tell her: "You hated dad, you made me eat peas, you wouldn’t let me get my ears double pierced, you started calling local hospitals if I was five minutes late coming home from field hockey practice, you called me Pooch."

But this time of year, we shouldn’t be fearing the transformation, we should be thinking about why we love our mothers, about how they’re always there for us and will sit in court and support us no matter what we’ve done; how they always tell us how beautiful we are and will put a frame around something we had published in a newsletter; about how when we’re lonely and depressed, they’ll take us into their arms and tell us everything will be OK, even if it won’t; and how somehow, we turned out pretty well, which must slightly be due to something they did right.  
    
So happy Mother's Day, moms. We’ll worry about the transformation after May 9.