Another Hallmark holiday is upon us: Mother's Day 2021. I don't honestly recall last year's holiday, perhaps because we were still in the throes of a pretty terrible bout of COVID in New York City. We were deep in the dueling sirens phase, listening to ambulances race back and forth between the hospitals we live near. I'm sure my daughter, an event planner and occasion-marker extraordinaire, organized her siblings to celebrate mom, but I honestly cannot recall the details. That's no reflection on my daughter; it's solely a reflection on my inability to remember many things.
This Mother's Day, I wanted to pause to acknowledge the only thing--or rather people--who make it possible for me to participate in this day: my children. They've lived quite a year, from Mother's Day 2020 to Mother's Day 2021. One graduated from law school; another finished out a college year; a third saw all of his special needs programs shut down for in-person participation, which left him without anything to do for months on end. But the pandemic also brought all my kids under one roof for the first time in nearly a decade. That was an incredible thing. And lest anyone think that 'incredible' only has positive connotations, let me say that it also meant having five adults and two dogs in an apartment that once felt pretty spacious and came rather quickly to feel like a studio. Lots of stuff to contend with, and even more laundry than usual. My eldest hadn't been home for any extended time in nine years, since he'd left for college. I could see that he was a bit rusty with our rhythms, especially regarding his autistic younger brother. And even with his sister, he'd missed living with her and her particular approaches to cohabiting, so lots of things needed to be negotiated, and renegotiated. It was not always smooth sailing.
But, we somehow made it through the year, with my daughter thriving in school and socially, with my eldest passing the bar exam and transitioning to his new role in the Navy, and with my other son managing with surprising equanimity to tolerate the total disruption of his program-focused life. I like to think that we didn't lose our collective minds because we had long ago established something that bonded us to one another--come hell, high water, or a raging pandemic: enough love and loyalty to tide us over, to carry us through.
I'm typing this as a sit in a little home office--really just a sliver of space with back to back desks and computers for my younger son and me. I don't love the smallness of the space, but I love the space itself because its walls are covered with the things that give me joy: loads of family photos of adventures we've taken through the years. I can look up and see my husband and me in the main plaza of Quito, Ecuador, all of us on the terrace of a restaurant in the Dominican Republic, and all of us once again, wearing our life vests before a jet ski outing in the Florida Keys. Rather than feeling sad over the at-home restrictions of the past year, I can look at these photos over and over again and revel in the gratitude I feel for the opportunities I and we have had to be together in so many extraordinary places.
And while I might struggle to remember what last Mother's Day was like, I can tell you that this Mother's Day, looking back on a year in which all of us had COVID, in which all of us were challenged to stay focused on things forward-, positive-, and future-looking, I am reminded of all the ways in which being a mother change, surprise, overwhelm, sustain, exhaust, and inspire me. But I am also reminded that this is the first Mother's Day for me without my own mother. It was the one occasion, as I recall, when my father gave my mother gifts. I never asked him why, but I imagined it was because my father was especially grateful for the gifts my mother gave him that enabled him to be a father, a role he mastered in all the ways that can or should matter. But that, of course, is for another Hallmark holiday...
