As we collectively celebrate mothers on this random Sunday in May, I always think about my mom, and the complicated knot of emotions tied around my memories of her.
She once told me. “I love you because your my daughter, but I don’t particularly like you.”
And I’m sure at the time I deserved it, being a snarky, emotional rollercoaster of a teenager. At that stage of my life I was pretty sure I didn’t like me either.
But it was always deeper than that.
My mother pushed me to reach some ethereal potential only she could see. And she pushed hard. Relentlessly, with her razor tongue and uncanny talent for sniffing out my most vulnerable trigger.
As difficult as she was, there was another rare and vulnerable side to her. It peeks through my memories, little precious gems, like the time she carried me piggy back when we were lost on one of the trails in Fairmount Park.
My mom’s strength was in her spirit. She was a tiny, bird boned woman, long past the days when she played high school sports- hockey, lacrosse, and her beloved tennis. Those loves had been ripped from her by illness.
Epilepsy was her secret shame, something that divided her life into before- when she was the vivacious, outgoing athlete and actress- and the horrible struggles of after. She endured the stigma of a misunderstood condition (it was the 1950s), and the sometimes barbaric treatment for it.
So when she hoisted me on her back that day at Valley Green, even my exhausted, whiny, six-year-old self knew it was a feat of mind over matter, proof that while she expected great things from me, she expected as much from herself.
To quote Shakespeare, “though she be but little, she is fierce.”
I could write a book to explore the complexities of my relationship with my mother. Maybe someday I will.
I have written a piece of her story in my college thesis. It helped me begin to understand the soul beneath her fire, the lost little girl whose own brain chemistry betrayed her, the young woman who turned her pain into anger, her anger into unbreakable will to succeed.
My mother has been gone for fourteen years. And I miss her.
I miss her caustic humor. I miss her arrogant driving, her little digs at my lack of housekeeping skills. I miss our political debates, going with her to the town dump, her simple joy in sweeping the barn aisle, her pride in finding a new job at the age of 75. I wish I’d had the chance to show her the pictures from the lifechanging trip she made possible.
To all of those imperfect mothers, for all of those remembered with love and affection, all of those wonder woman mothers who manage the impossible every day, I wish you a very Happy Mother’s Day
*For anyone with oodles of free time or interest in more of my mother’s story, here is the link to my thesis. https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/bitstream/handle/10166/737/384.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Nancie Abuhaidar 