A Mother’s Day wish to see her own again

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

You know those questions that pop up on Facebook? The kind we used to ask at dinner parties, when we had dinner parties. Questions like, if you could spend a day with one person living or dead, who would it be?

For years I chose famous people because of all I could learn from them. Jesus Christ. Mozart. Queen Elizabeth II. Today, though, if asked this question, I would choose my unheralded, very much missed mother.

I would also choose where and when we would spend our day: The house I grew up in, 9 Davis Road, Randolph, not because I loved that house but because my mother did. And December, 1969. Not May, 2023, because my mother and I wouldn’t recognize one another today. I don’t have a clue what a spirit looks like and she might be stymied searching for a daughter who qualifies for senior discounts.

“Hi Mom,” a young me would say on this plucked-out-of-a-fairy-tale day. I would bounce up the back stairs and into the kitchen where, when my mother wasn’t at work, I most always found her, washing something or cooking something. And singing. My mother was always singing. And she would turn to me and gasp, surprised because I don’t live here anymore, because I am a married woman with my own home and I have just had a baby and he is in my arms and there she is looking at me, and she is young, too. And pretty. “Hi Mom. Look who I brought to see you.”

My mother dries her hands, her smile big, her smile telling me hello and I am so glad you’re here. And please let me hold that baby, right now. And it would be real, all of this, not imagined. Not a wish or a memory, my mother walking toward me, undoing her apron, reaching for me and the child we both love, her hands damp and warm and smelling like soap.

I am 22 and she is 43 and the infant who made me a mother and her a grandmother is only weeks old. And it is real, it is current, it is my one day, my choice, my wish, and there she is my mother, standing tall, walking and talking and smiling and planning, healthy and sturdy, the way I try to remember her. She wants to go to South Shore Plaza and have Robbie’s picture taken with Santa, she tells me. She’ll drive. She wants to buy him a Christmas onesie, too. But first, she wants to show me what she’s done to his room.

His room. It used to be the guest room. It used to have a full-size maple bed and dresser. Now a crib’s in that room. A white crib. The changing table is white, too.

I notice everything this time around. I don’t take any of it for granted. I memorize the bedding. The wallpaper. The stuffed animals. The toy box, the rocking chair, the new curtains, the love in my mother’s eyes.

She sits in the chair and rocks my son. She had a son. His name was Joseph. He lived for 20 minutes. She never told me. She never talked about him. We talk now. She tells me about him and the three others, born before their time.

We put my baby in his crib and leave the door open so we can hear him when he wakes.

Downstairs, my mother makes coffee. We sit at the kitchen table and she lights a cigarette while the coffee perks. We talk. We talk all day. We talk while she makes lunch, while we eat lunch, while we change and feed the child we both love. We talk in the car and while we shop. We talk after we shop. We talk long after my father comes home. I ask her things I never asked her. And when I go home, I write down every word.

Two years later, an accident will silence my mother. She will be in a coma for three months and it will takes years for her to relearn how to sit, stand, talk, walk. For the rest of her life, she will be compromised. And then one day when she seems stable, she will die.

But because, on this day, I have written down her words, they will guide me. They will be my road map, which I will study. How old were you when … ? What did you do after … ? Is this normal, Mom … ? What do you think I should do about … ? All the whys and whens and hows answered.

If you could spend a day with one person? It’s a game. It’s fantasy. But if it were real? I would choose my mother and that day in December when I really did show up at her door. When she held my son and me in her arms and we talked and talked and shopped and talked some more. Only this time I would talk less and listen more. This time I would make it all about her.

Because if I had known? If I had seen the future? But I didn’t know. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? We never know.