Looking back

Once you reach a certain age -- once your own mother is no longer with you, for example -- Mother's Day takes on a peculiarly bittersweet quality.

You're certainly relieved of your annual obligation to buy mom a present or flowers -- a tedious piece of "drudgery" that seems in retrospect so trivial, so petty, as to make you wonder why you ever felt it an obligation rather than a privilege. You're happy for the younger families -- those of relatives and friends -- who still gather with their mothers, by phone if not in person -- to commemorate the day.

For me, the day especially recalls memories of the past. Not the past when I hurriedly ordered flowers by long distance, but a more distant past, back when I'd proudly construct my own greeting cards with crayons and scissors, or a year or so later, when I'd buy some small gift with money from my allowance. Or,once I reached 10 or 11, when I'd put together my own version of a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast and serve it to my mother in bed -- because I'd seen in the comic strips that that's how the holdiay was done. (I'm sure she would have preferred eating at a table. And I'm a little disturbed that I have no memory whatsoever of cleaning up the mess in the kitchen afterwards.)

I guess what I'm saying is that Mother's Day reminds me -- more so in some ways than do more iconic holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving -- of a time when life seemed much more stable and unchanging. The big holidays were all different from each other, depending on what presents we received that year, or which distant relatives happened to be present, or at whose house we ate dinner. But Mother's Day was a more intimate holiday, one observed only by our nuclear family for no more than half the day. It changed little from year to year.

Every Mother's Day seemed about the same, and they seemed to come one after another in an endless procession. When you're a kid, at least a kid with a stable home life, you feel that this is the way life is, and always has been. And always will be. Because even by the time you reach high school, you're still a child in many ways. You still find it hard to wrap your mind around the concept that your family's annual cycle of events won't continue indefinitely, although you know rationally that you soon will be leaving for college.

The routine of daily life -- the recurrance each year of Mother's Day -- seemed eternal. And yet, that's just the child's perspective. For the parents -- as you finally realize, once you're well into adulthood -- that period of "normality" was one that had begun just a short time earlier, and one that passed incredibly quickly, leaving them alone together in their empty nest, waiting for the long distance telephone calls that seemed to come all too seldom.

I read a book review¹ in this morning's New York Times, a review of a somewhat old-fashioned novel that spans about 30 years in the life of an Iowa family. The review concludes:

With the decades' fluctuations little more than heavy weather outside the walls of the house, what one is left with is a sense of how provisional it all was anyway, and how fast it all went by.

And I guess it was those words and that book review, together with my memories of childhood prompted by Mother's Day, that provoked today's "bittersweet" blog posting.

My family all felt so stable and permanent at the time. But then we each left home and became an adult. We've seen our parents and other significant relatives pass away. And I'm left with fond memories of what now seems -- compared with childhoods of other folks I've known -- an unusually happy childhood.

But I'm left also with a stunned sense of "how fast it all went by."

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¹Jonathan Dee, NY Times, reviewing The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson.