When I was growing up in Israel, there was a short-lived show on television called “Hahaverim Shel Yael” (“Yael’s Friends”), which featured a peppy girl who introduced short clips acted out by puppets. The actress who played Yael was probably in her twenties, but she was dressed up to look like a child, in flowery dresses and pigtails. I loved that program, in which the puppets occassionally crossed into real life and made a mess of Yael’s studio. Right before the opening music came on, Yael would look into the camera and fake-whisper to the viewers, “Tell your mother to turn up the volume!” Once, as my twin sister and I were settling down on the sofa to watch, my mother overheard this opening bit. “And what about those who don’t have a mother?” she asked.
I must have been seven or eight at the time. I was irritated with her for asking that question, forever ruining the show for me. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It summed up, I now realize, her parenting philosophy. The way she didn’t baby us, but treated us like thoughtful people, capable of empathy. The way she was always fully there—registering, questioning. But mostly, I think, it showed her unyielding belief in fairness, which, years later, I would hear her define as justice played out in the private sphere. (She was a philosophy professor, preoccupied with definitions.) It was a particular kind of fairness, one that centered on a child’s sensibility. Once, when I asked her whom she loved more, my sister or me, she answered, simply, “You.” Incredulous, my sister posed the same question. “Who do you love more, Ima? Ruth or me?” “You,” my mother said. We tried again. Each time, my mother invariably told whoever asked that she loved her more. “This doesn’t make any sense,” we finally said. She smiled and told us, “Sure it does. Don’t you see? I love you more and I love you more.” This was her sense of fairness: no kid wants to hear that they are loved the same as their sister.
This Mother’s Day, three and a half years after she died, I find myself turning over her question in my mind. And what about those who don’t have a mother?
“CALL MOM” said a sign the other day, and something inside me clenched. In my inbox, at work, an email waited from the New York Times: a limited offer to “treat Mom” to a free gift. It’s nothing, I tell myself. A day for advertisers. So I shrug off the sales and the offers, the cards and the flowers. I press delete. Still, I now mark Mother’s Day on my private calendar of grief. Anyone who has experienced a loss must have one of those. There’s August 29th, my mother’s birthday—forever stopped at sixty-four. September 17th, my parents’ anniversary—a day on which I now make a point of calling my father, and we both make a point of talking about anything but. There’s June 6th, the day she was diagnosed—when a cough that she had told us was “annoying” her and a leg that she had been dragging, thinking she must have pulled a muscle, turned out to be symptoms of Stage IV lung cancer. And then there’s October 16th: the day she died, four months and ten days after the diagnosis. The year becomes a landscape filled with little mines.
Trust me, I’m too aware of the fact that my mother is gone to wish her here in any serious way on Mother’s Day. But does the holiday have to be in May, when the lilacs are in full bloom? When a gentle breeze stirs—the kind of breeze that reminds me of days when she would recline on a deck chair on our Jerusalem porch, head tilted back, urging me to “sit a while”?
Meghan O’Rourke has a wonderful word for the club of those without mothers. She calls us not motherless but unmothered. It feels right—an ontological word rather than a descriptive one. I had a mother, and now I don’t. This is not a characteristic one can affix, like being paperless, or odorless. The emphasis should be on absence.
I must have been seven or eight at the time. I was irritated with her for asking that question, forever ruining the show for me. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It summed up, I now realize, her parenting philosophy. The way she didn’t baby us, but treated us like thoughtful people, capable of empathy. The way she was always fully there—registering, questioning. But mostly, I think, it showed her unyielding belief in fairness, which, years later, I would hear her define as justice played out in the private sphere. (She was a philosophy professor, preoccupied with definitions.) It was a particular kind of fairness, one that centered on a child’s sensibility. Once, when I asked her whom she loved more, my sister or me, she answered, simply, “You.” Incredulous, my sister posed the same question. “Who do you love more, Ima? Ruth or me?” “You,” my mother said. We tried again. Each time, my mother invariably told whoever asked that she loved her more. “This doesn’t make any sense,” we finally said. She smiled and told us, “Sure it does. Don’t you see? I love you more and I love you more.” This was her sense of fairness: no kid wants to hear that they are loved the same as their sister.This Mother’s Day, three and a half years after she died, I find myself turning over her question in my mind. And what about those who don’t have a mother?
“CALL MOM” said a sign the other day, and something inside me clenched. In my inbox, at work, an email waited from the New York Times: a limited offer to “treat Mom” to a free gift. It’s nothing, I tell myself. A day for advertisers. So I shrug off the sales and the offers, the cards and the flowers. I press delete. Still, I now mark Mother’s Day on my private calendar of grief. Anyone who has experienced a loss must have one of those. There’s August 29th, my mother’s birthday—forever stopped at sixty-four. September 17th, my parents’ anniversary—a day on which I now make a point of calling my father, and we both make a point of talking about anything but. There’s June 6th, the day she was diagnosed—when a cough that she had told us was “annoying” her and a leg that she had been dragging, thinking she must have pulled a muscle, turned out to be symptoms of Stage IV lung cancer. And then there’s October 16th: the day she died, four months and ten days after the diagnosis. The year becomes a landscape filled with little mines.
Trust me, I’m too aware of the fact that my mother is gone to wish her here in any serious way on Mother’s Day. But does the holiday have to be in May, when the lilacs are in full bloom? When a gentle breeze stirs—the kind of breeze that reminds me of days when she would recline on a deck chair on our Jerusalem porch, head tilted back, urging me to “sit a while”?
Meghan O’Rourke has a wonderful word for the club of those without mothers. She calls us not motherless but unmothered. It feels right—an ontological word rather than a descriptive one. I had a mother, and now I don’t. This is not a characteristic one can affix, like being paperless, or odorless. The emphasis should be on absence.
by Ruth Margalit, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ruth Margalit
