A Mother's Day Tribute

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Several years ago my daughter wrote a Mother's Day tribute for an online magazine and then gave me a copy of what she wrote for my Mother's Day gift. I have carried that tattered copy around with me for years. Here is what she wrote:

The same now-yellowed newspaper clipping has been taped to my grandmother's refrigerator for the past 15 years. My mom was out with my baby sister in a stroller when a photographer was on assignment to scout a sweet centerpiece scene for Mother's Day.
Young mother and baby out for a walk in the spring sun? Perfect.

I love looking through old photo albums at my grandmother's house. I love looking at my mother with her long, straight hippie hair, and my aunt, her sister--the one who played jokes on my mom from the time they were little.

Like when she hid in the bathtub behind the curtain and their cousins locked my mom out and flushed the toilet. "She's going down the drain!" they taunted. And my mother, just three years old, burst into tears. She was away from her mother for the week, her father had just left and now, in this strange house with these strange boy cousins, her sister had been flushed down the toilet.

I used to tell my friends that my mother almost strangled a boy who tried to kiss me after school in the parking lot in second grade. Actually,I ws trying to kiss him and he was struggling to keep me away by putting his hands around my throat. My mother, seeing this, leapt from the car where she had been waiting, grabbd the kid by the collar and proceeded to demonstrate on him exactly what she wouldn't allow him to do to her daughter. I thought that was the best story. The time my mom strangled my boyfriend.

I never wrote thank you notes to my mother. Mothers make you write thank you notes to your grandmother and your aunts and the kind neighbor who always remembers your birthday. But there's no one to make sure you write Mom one, too. Mothers know you love them, and that they gave you exactly what you wanted, so we assume the thank you is understood. And those are just the wrapped presents.

But then comes a moment when you realize there are so many thank yous that you forgot to say--that you couldn't possibly catch up. So many gestures big and small that you could write a note every day and always have more to say. Just the things she did for my wedding day alone outnumber the days left in this year.

A few weeks ago, I came home from vacation to find a formerly bare and ugly dirt patch in front of our house filled with Easter lilies, hydrangeas, begonias, azaleas, daisies and other sweet-scented colorful blessings I couldn't name, but thought beautiful. I knew immediately who the spring angel was. I called up Mom to thank her.

"Do you like it? she asked. "Did you notice right away?" She was as excited for me to have come home and found the surprise birthday gift as I was.

The best gift my mother gave me growing up wasn't the parties, the clothes, or the trips to take me my forgotten lunch bag. It was a sense of myself as a woman who wanted to be both strong and tender, independent and able to connect, angry at injustice and at peace with myself. It was the knowledge that I could be anything I wanted to be, including a wife and mother-if I wanted to, because they were good things to be.

And the knowledge that if I failed at any of those possibilities, she would not hold it against me, but would always be there to come home to, brush off the dirt and tears, and try again.

Happy Mother's Day! Thanks for everything! Love always, Amanda