"Bullshit"

Happy Mother's Day

Today is Mother’s Day, “a bullshit holiday” according to my late mother, Betsy Ross Rosen Rosenberg. My mom loved any excuse to use the word bullshit, and Mother’s Day was better than most, though among the things I will never learn from her is where her contempt for the holiday came from. I can’t remember back long enough to know if she always felt that way, or whether it galvanized when we attempted to perform Mother’s Day as a nuclear family in 1983 and never recovered from it. Generally skeptical and unsentimental, while also intensely sensitive with seismic emotions, I suspect my mother hated Mother’s Day because she knew better than to fall for a fake holiday created by greeting card companies, yet couldn’t help but be disappointed when her family didn’t honor her in the way she wanted.

As a result of that fateful Sunday and her penchant for storytelling, Mother’s Day was an easy one to celebrate with her. No brunches, no need to send a card the week before, though sometimes I would, just as a joke. Usually it was a phone call to say something like, “I’m not calling for any particular reason on the second Sunday in May other than to tell you how much I LOOOVE you!” which could make her laugh and send her into a diatribe about her favorite least favorite holiday.

My mom has been gone for about 28 months and I am still learning about how you process the end of the most formative relationship of one’s life. In her last years, my siblings and I were much more parental to our mother than she was to us, which anyone would say is the natural progression of maturity and parenthood. Still, losing your parent makes you long for the long-ago times you yourself felt parented.

In August of 1990, my cousin Neal got married up in Buffalo. It was the first cousin wedding in my family, and also the first family event that my dad wouldn’t be joining, as he and my mother had just separated that spring. I was 17, a recent high-school graduate, on my way to college across the country in a few weeks. I was also in the final throws of an indelibly fucked up relationship with my first “boyfriend” (never in our years together did he publicly acknowledge me as his girlfriend - hence the scare quotes). In other words, this was a perfect time for me to start drinking. No one around me noticed or cared, wine tasted great, my life was just getting started, and I had the shoulder pads to prove it.

After the wedding, my cousin Donald drunk-drove my brother and me to look at Niagara Falls, and then dropped us off at the hotel. My mother and I were sharing a room, and I don’t remember what made things turn so abruptly from the elation of being indoctrinated into adulthood, to the crushing pain of having to grow up, but the next thing I knew, I was crying hysterically and begging for these feelings to go away.

For the previous 2 years, I’d been watching and recoiling as my mother had these breakdowns herself, as she dealt first with her own mother dying, then made the decision to divorce my dad. But that night she held me and stroked by back and repeated, “I know, I know” as if she really did. I don’t remember another time that I cried openly in front of her again until we the day we took her off life support and said goodbye.

I will probably continue to memorialize my mother for the rest of my life. I will exploit her idiosyncrasies, and exaggerate her virtues and faults for my own artistic gains. I will try to honor her and try to understand her damaged parts to better understand my own, but I will never get the whole picture. Mother’s Day is now a day to tease out these odd memories, try them on and thank them for their service. I think it’s the best thing one can do with a bullshit holiday created by greeting card companies.