65th Mother’s Day is unlike any that has gone before

My brother’s stimulus check arrived. That would be encouraging when so many are still waiting for their checks. Except. My brother died a year ago. This was hardly a secret since a note on the payee’s line reads “DECD.” This means “deceased.” You’d think that might have been a clue for list preparers, but they made out the check anyhow.

I remembered how my brother and I picked wildflowers for our mom on the hills around Spokane. In Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” the Red Queen tells Alice that it’s important to practice believing in the impossible. The queen explains, “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” she said. We’re practicing now, perhaps.

This is my 65th Mother’s Day. People sometimes express astonishment that I have six children. Well, you can’t give them back, you know. I estimate that over the years, I’ve attended at least 532 PTA meetings, volunteered for 389 bake and thrift sales. I packed at least 864 lunches before I realized what a valuable learning experience it would be for the children to pack their own. If there were a Nobel Prize for peanut butter sandwich making, I’d have it locked up.

I’ve made hundreds of birthday cakes. My proudest culinary achievement was the Darth Vader cake—a life-size head baked in Pyrex bowls and cake pans and glued together with black frosting, which turned out to be permanent. We all went around for days looking as if we’d contracted some rare tropical disease.

But it was delicious.

Somehow, it’s never seemed so important to stay in touch. My friend Josie writes to a list of people she cares about. At last check, the list was about 100 names long. She tries to write at least six cards a day. Something like, “We’ll have cookies and coffee soon, even if we have to do 2 cars in the parking lot.”

Many people seem to have the same idea because recent news reports say that along with meat and toilet paper, there’s a national shortage of greeting cards.

Mother’s Day was never meant to be about gifts and greeting cards, of course. Anna Jarvis famously created the first Mother’s Day in 1908 to honor her own mother who had been a Sunday school teacher and had cared for wounded soldiers during the Civil War. When Jarvis realized merchants were monopolizing the simple day she envisioned, she began urging people to stop buying flowers and cards for their mothers. According to an article in The Atlantic, Jarvis wrote that those industries were peopled with “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers kidnappers and termites.” She really didn’t like them. Finally, she went door to door trying to get signatures for petitions to repeal Mother’s Day.

So maybe we have to make greeting cards just as our kids used to make cards for us. One of my most treasured keepsakes is a stuffed animal copied from a line drawing one of my daughters created when she was six. She drew it. A friend sewed it together from white muslin, and it’s stuffed with – I don’t know – stuffing. We could never exactly identify the animal, but cuddly and strange, it still holds an important place in my room and my heart.

My children have come this week to bring groceries and Mother’s Day gifts, appropriately masked and keeping social distancing. “Make good choices now, mother,” they say. I’m trying. I’m trying, but I do need a hug.

This year for the first time, I find myself saying, “What if this is the last time we talk? What if this is the last time we’re together.” That’s always been that danger, of course, but it seems more urgent now.

Sometimes, a bit of hope creeps in. In a recent phone conversation, my granddaughter praised the wonderfully creative teacher who actually makes Zoom distance learning sessions exciting for our fourth-grader.

We mused a little about Mother’s Day. She reported that she loved motherhood, but it had changed her frontal curves. “Flat as pancakes,” she said. “No one told me that would happen.”

We observed a moment of silence in honor of our mutual lost or drooping dimensions, and then she said, “I’d also like to add that I never knew what happiness was until I saw their faces.”

Happy Mother’s Day.

Where to find Dorothy in May

Of course, she’s home, sheltering in place, but please join Dorothy on her Swimming Upstream podcast at www.itsnevertoolate.com or www.sobradionetwork.com.

• May 10: Justice Richard Guy - What Can We Expect From the Supreme Court?
  
  
• May 17: Generation Gap – Ray Still and Dorothy Wilhelm share ideas to make the quarantine easier.
• May 24: Making Times of Corona Work For You – Humorist, author, international speaker Dr. Patt Schwab.

• May 20: Monthly Tea Party – on Zoom. Can we get through?

NOTE: Date indicates when each show “goes live.” It’s then available until the end of time.

This story was originally published May 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "65th Mother’s Day is unlike any that has gone before."