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Letter from Joyce Archives
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May 13, 2007
Dear Friends,
As
I mentioned in one of my letters a few weeks back, Mother’s Day has
always seemed like a somewhat artificial holiday. “Just an excuse
for selling chocolates and greeting cards,” I grumble. And then,
every year, I find myself getting caught up short -- feeling sad, if my
children don’t mark the day, getting melancholy about my own mother
(whose fatal brain tumor was diagnosed nineteen years ago this Mother’s
Day.)
So, despite my reservations about the day, I did want to acknowledge it here. And since one of my complaints about Mother’s Day has always been that one day hardly seems sufficient, to honor all that mothers do for their children, I decided to spend an entire month of these letters, talking about mothers.
The other part of Mother’s Day that always made me uneasy has been the way, in our culture, we tend to glorify the qualities of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in women, particularly as those qualities relate to husbands and children. Where, in my case -- and in the case of many of the women I know -- our mothers’ excessive self sacrifice (and the guilt it produced in us) was hardly a good thing.
One of my favorite mothers, among my friends, recently left her husband of twenty eight years, not for keeps, just for a little sabbatical. (She came out West, bought herself a thirty year old car for twelve hundred dollars, got a job cleaning tourist cabins and tending the chickens at a bed and breakfast on the coast, and declared herself the happiest she’d been in years. But even though her children were all grown and launched in good, healthy, independent lives of their own, she struggled with the notion that she had somehow abandoned them, because she won’t be there at home, this fourth of July, to serve up the blueberry pie, on one of the increasingly rare days they come home to visit.)
This particular woman will return to her husband and home eventually, I believe, and when she does, everyone in her family will be stronger, better, kinder and more compassionate because of the choice she made this spring, to take care of herself for a change. It is hardly an original line, but one worth repeating, on this of all days, that “If Mama’s happy, everyone’s happy. If Mama’s not happy… we’re all in trouble.”
So, in the spirit of encouraging a certain too-rare impulse towards self-preservation and independence, among mothers, I wanted to finish up this series of Mother-oriented columns of mine with one I wrote a few years back, called “My Mother at Fifty.”
(And by the way, in the photograph accompanying this letter, of my mother and me, I am eighteen. She was just a year shy of fifty herself. Odd to think, I’m older than the woman in that photograph now.)
As a rare treat, I am also sharing with you a wonderful group of reminiscences and stories about mothers and grandmothers, sent to me by some of you. (Inspired by the success of this one, I’ll hope to do this sort of thing again in the future, or -- once we are able to reinstate our interactive message board -- to regularly offer you the opportunity to share your stories with readers of my website.)
I want to thank everyone who sent in these stories. I loved hearing from you all.
And I want to end this letter with one last thought. It’s about women who are not mothers -- either by choice, or the lack of opportunity, or the simple fact of biology. Although this particular holiday is not one that excludes me, I have known the experience of being alone on a day that seemed to celebrate the joy and good fortune of everyone around me, except for me. (I’ve been alone at Christmas on occasion. Alone on Thanksgiving. Love-less on Valentine’s Day. Let’s not even talk about how it feels when Flag Day rolls around….)
Seriously. And so I want to remind my friends in this little community that someone in your world may be feeling a little left out today. If so, I hope you’ll take a moment to honor her, too. Because really, Mother’s Day is not about celebrating women who have given birth. It’s about honoring nurturers, in whatever form that nurturing may take.
You don’t have
to be a mother to qualify.
Yours, with friendship,
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