It has been 17 years since I last celebrated Mother’s Day with my mother still on this earth.
Not that I intend for this to be a sad column. It’s more from the standpoint of paying tribute to what I had in her, and appreciating what she is in me.
When I was much younger I used to contemplate how unthinkable it would be to lose her. I just knew I’d be a basket case. Not so. When she transitioned peacefully in her sleep on March 14, 1997, I didn’t have time to be a basket case. There was a funeral program to plan. Business transactions to complete. And, during her “home going celebration,” even a song to sing. I held up in a manner for which I give credit first to the Creator, second, to what must have been my subconscious knowledge that - as the cliched truth goes - she’s not really gone.
Nowadays, I see my mother everywhere. It used to be mainly in dreams. Now I see her in the gestures made by a dear friend when she talks … gestures I grew up with as I listened to Mama, a master storyteller, give a detailed synopsis of a book she’d read, or explain her point of view on whatever issue had her attention at the time.
I see her in sour cream cakes - or those that resemble and taste like them - at the grocery store and at friends’ holiday gatherings. She was known for cooking, period, her sour cream cake in particular. I see her in snickerdoodles, the cookies she baked liberally at Christmastime.
I definitely see her when I see somebody’s child acting out in public, or “showing out,” as she would have called it. I think of how I wouldn’t have been allowed to think about doing such a thing. I think of how my mother could usually silence me with a look, or a firm pinch. And if that didn’t work, woe be unto me. I often think of her when I get too loud, or bend over at the waist, or sit wrong, knowing that, according to her, “ladies” shouldn’t do any of those.
I see her in my idioms and “isms,” which, as longtime readers know, usually hark back to the early 20th century, rural black community in which my mother was raised. Idioms and “isms” that usually involve mules, although I have never owned or had to plow with one (thank goodness). I barely recognized the identity of a mule I saw in a recent parade. But here I am, spitting remarks about mules eating briers, or someone having enough money to burn a wet mule.
I even see her whenever I’m put on the spot to offer public prayer … just like her, I tend to go on too long.
And I still wonder what life might have been for Mama if that sharp mind of hers had been molded by a college education. If her health hadn’t been so fragile, especially in those last eight years of her life. If she hadn’t undergone the trauma and abuse she went through growing up … experiences revealed in part, here and there, and which I gradually pieced together and was left grateful that I didn’t bear the brunt of her hurts. If she hadn’t taken the guff she took as an adult. I wonder if I’d be here.
In the years since Mama’s passed, I’ve looked back at my mother through more objective eyes. I’ve made peace with the realization that, rather than being the Perfect Mother I saw her as all those years, Mama was anything but perfect. She had flaws. She wasn’t always right and she wasn’t always fair. And because of certain fears she harbored, she sheltered me to the point that I spent much of my adult years playing catchup when it came to grit and “mother wit.”
But she was Mama. She raised me in love, the best she knew how. And I continue to reap the benefits.
There’s an old, sad song we used to sing in church on Mother’s Day when I was growing up: “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again.” The chorus:
If I could hear my mother pray again, If I could hear her tender voice as then! So glad I’d be, ’twould mean so much to me, If I could hear my mother pray again.
The good thing is that I’m still “Going on Glad” from having benefited from her.
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Style, Pages 51 on 05/12/2013