My boss and I had a meeting at our lawyer's office the other day. We met with my favorite one - she's smart, and funny, and warm, and genuine, and a whole lot of other qualities you look for in a human being, generally, and I think are undervalued in lawyers, specifically. Walking us to the elevator bank after the meeting, she mentioned she'd just finished 'Lean In': 'It's pretty universally applicable'. She and my boss - both professionals and mothers - discussed the working mom balance, that maybe the tides are finally really turning, equitable division of responsibilities in households is more and more the norm...I fell back a little. Not because my only contribution would have been along the lines of 'My dog is amazing at cleaning up food I drop on the floor, and he can tell if someone has evil in their soul, both come in handy.' Well, not only because of that. But because, also, I was thinking: 'How strange that any of this would be a foreign concept. No one had to suggest any of this to me. I just watched my mother.'
Four years old, leaving a department store in the rain, sulking and whining because I didn't get something I wanted. Stomping: "It's not fair!" My mother did not break stride. "Life's not fair, honey," she said. "Get used to it." Oh, that ALL PARENTS were this honest from the gate. Because it isn't, is it?
Thirteen years old, the first time I wore foundation, I put on entirely too much. Probably everyone is terrible at makeup in the beginning, you get better. And now people are surprised, given my near religious devotion to mascaras and sparkly eyeshadows and tinted moisturizers, that my mother doesn't wear any makeup at all. She doesn't. I say: 'I figured this shit out on my own'. But that's not entirely true. That night, she took me into the bathroom. As I washed it off, she told me 'it should look like you're not wearing anything'. The second most important thing you can tell a girl about her face. She didn't have to say a thing about the most important part, I learned by example. Her facial care routine has always been on point.
Sixteen years old, in the hospital, feeling the worst and saddest and most unloveable, like a garbage wretch of a child, like I deserved anything awful she, anyone, everyone felt about me. In the depths of that, my mother sent me a stuffed lamb, the softest, loveliest thing, it fit in the crook of my elbow. In the card attached, in her gorgeous, delicate cursive - my mother's handwriting looks like it belongs in a Jane Austen novel - she told me how much she loved me, the way she loved me, in a way that made everything seem, if not immediately better, then hopeful - like there were wonderful things ahead that I couldn't imagine yet, but she had ultimate confidence in. Hope is the purest gift. And, she was right. I kept the lamb; she helps me remember.
Twenty-one years old, melting down over something impossible, some insurmountable challenge. My mother: "You know, human beings can't remember pain accurately," she turned a page, considered a point in the distance. "Otherwise, no one would ever have a second child." It is the most brilliant advice I've ever received. This seems so bad right now, but pain ends. Eventually it's not even a memory. It is amazing what we can get through, what we are capable of becoming next.
Twenty-two years old, my mother takes me on a tour of HHC's new heath care center. She started there when I was in high school, an organization scattered across two offices, now consolidated into a spectacular renovated factory building downtown. It was of course an effort of many, but walking through the building, Sally introducing me to contractors and architects and administrators and doctors, I kept thinking 'my mother did this. My mother did this.' There are people with giant hearts, and then there are the people with giant hearts in action, who do things that help innumerable people that they will never meet, will never thank them, and who don't care about that. Lean in? My mother hoisted that shit over her head and ran with it.
Twenty-four years old, I'd spent the summer having a slow-burn of a breakdown in my parent's house, they barely got me back to law school. Barely. I'd been back in New Orleans a week when my mother called me. Hurricane Katrina was still all speculation and hypothetical disaster. It was a Friday night. "I'm buying you a ticket," she said. "No," I told her. "No, it'll be nothing. We'll go to Houston if we need to, like for Ivan. I just got back." (What a fucking brat.) "I'm buying you the ticket," she said. "You're coming home tomorrow morning." And I did. And everyone knows what happened next.
Twenty-nine years old, sitting on the back porch in Scituate with my mother and KH#1, drinking red wine out of sparkly little glasses in the sun, my mother tells us the story of how she and my father met. I'd never heard it before. Later, when I get a little too emotional at dinner, stand up and cry-toast KH#1, my mother pats the seat next to her, suggests 'No more wine' and pats my leg. It occurs to me that there might not be an ounce of judgment in this woman.
Thirty years old, days from thirty-one, I call my parents and my dad picks up. I ask 'Is Mom there?' and he pauses. "Is everything okay?" It has been an historical rarity, an issue I can bring to one of them and not the other. I take a weird little half breath. "I need to talk about boys." The most insanely reasonable, comforting conversation about matters of the heart follows. I think: 'is there anything she doesn't know?'
Momma, thank you. For being you, showing me everything you've shown me, teaching me everything you've taught me, and mostly, for letting me be myself, for believing in me and always knowing when I need a boost the most, for surprising me into believing in myself. You can ask anyone, I say it all the time: "If Sally thinks it's good, if Sally believes in it..." Thank you for showing me that there isn't a thing I can't do. Thank you for being my mother, and thank you for being my friend. I love you so much.
Happy Mother's Day,
kk
