Mother's Day Hokey, but Love Is Real

The Boston Herald

So it's a hokey holiday. All those mushy cards. All that cold coffee and burned toast served on makeshift trays to tired mothers who would prefer to skip breakfast and sleep just a little longer. All the overpriced flowers that are dead in two days and perfumes that smell like bug spray and sweaters that are too big and pants that are too tight and housewares that you never use.

But it's OK because this is the one day of the year when it really is the thought that counts. So you smell like Raid for a day. Who cares? Mother's Day is the adult equivalent of a child's crayoned card. What it lacks in substance,  it makes up for in sentiment. That's its charm. But it's not an intermission from motherhood. This is the invention. There is no intermission, no real day off - ever. Someone should tell you this before you become a mother. Actually someone does - your own mother. But you don't believe her. You think she exaggerates. Then you have a child and you learn. Infants need to be fed and changed and held and rocked. Toddlers need to be fed and changed and held and taught. Children need all of these things and more. Then they're teens and then adults. Then you remember another thing your mother told you: small children, small problems; big children, bigger problems.

So today is not perfection. It's a Hallmark holiday. But at least it's something. It's a kind of Veterans Day that sets a mood, that gathers together old soldiers and new recruits and puts them in the spotlight and  makes people think, at least for a while, about mothers and all they do. 

There won't be any big parades today with mothers marching en masse, which would be nice. But there will be lots of little parades and quiet celebrations. Millions of kids right now are making breakfast and drawing cards for their mothers. These are the sweetest celebrations.

When my son was 14, he worked at the corner store nights and weekends and spent way more than he ever should have on a dress he thought was beautiful and which he gave me that Mother's Day.

"Do you like it, Mom?” he asked as I took it from its box. I lied and said I loved it, just as my mother had lied to me when I bought her pink-and-aqua stretch pants. He wanted me to wear the dress that very day but I told him it didn't fit. A few days later I took it back and told him the next size was too big. And I gave him back his money. "But I don't want the money, Mom. I wanted you to keep the dress.” I should have. But I was doing the mother thing - thinking about his wallet and not his heart.

There will be a lot of that going on today because there will be a lot of misspent money. Whole families will go out to dinner and someone will have a bad meal or someone will get sick or there'll be an argument and the meal will be ruined. Clothing won't fit. Someone will say, "How could you get me a vacuum cleaner for Mother's Day?" But the gifts and the meals are just the clumsy, inadequate things we use to try express feelings.

A few weeks ago I watched a mother take her small son out of his car seat in the parking lot of Osco Drug. It was warm and breezy and the woman caught my eye because her sweater was flapping and she was being blown around, but she was smiling. She reached into the back seat and pulled out a little boy in a pale blue hat, and then she held him above her head and twirled with him right there in the parking lot. She closed the car door with her hip and continued to twirl across the parking lot until she found a store carriage and put the child in it. Then she disappeared.

Seconds in a child's life. That's what this day is about, millions of small, quiet moments like this.