Mothers are people, too: a Mother’s Day lesson

Only now, at half a decade past my mid-century birthday, am I beginning to understand mothers. My mother, my mother’s mother, myself as a mother, and the many mothers who guided me as a child, teenager and young woman.

The mother of my best friend from childhood passed away recently. My friend and I had been estranged lately, and although we had talked out the reasons for our estrangement—the botched communications and resentments—our friendship had not really healed.

So when I got the e-mail that Kara’s mother was recovering from surgery in a nearby nursing home, I made a note on my calendar to visit. The first date passed and I put the visit off to the following Thursday. She had been expected to recuperate there for several weeks before going home. Instead, she died that Thursday morning from a sudden and powerful bacterial infection.

If we are destined to live long enough to learn life’s major lessons, I will live a very long time. This is not the first time I have put off getting in touch with someone, only to have it be too late. I made it to my mother’s bedside minutes after she died—so soon I could feel her spirit lifting out of her body, but not soon enough to feel I had comforted her in her dying. “Let that be a lesson to you” has been wasted on me.

Other life lessons have made it through the dense cerebrum. While I wasn’t there to visit Kara’s mother Kay, I was able to reconnect with my friend and provide some measure of comfort to her. Whatever turmoil our friendship has endured, the bond of a lifelong relationship endures in spite of it.

When Kara asked me to speak at the memorial service, I thought of our childhood together, growing up under her mother’s keen and inquisitive eyes, while she somehow managed to give us our privacy along with the necessary amounts of sustenance and boundaries. As a mother myself now, I know how difficult a balancing act that can be.

When Kara and I were young, Kay was a recently divorced single working mother, living in an East Village tenement. We went to the same Unitarian youth camp upstate, and both of us attended Community Church in Manhattan. Although that connection faded years ago, our youth minister at Community officiated at my wedding and at the funerals of my mother and both of Kara’s parents. There is history between us.

My first sleepover dates were in that East Village apartment. I remember it as dimly lit, quiet, with minimal furnishings and impeccably clean, always. For sleepovers, often unplanned, Kay always made a bed for me, with a full set of linens. I never gave it a thought—the extra laundry to carry down to the laundromat, the need to plan for an extra mouth to feed. It all unfolded without a hint of effort or inconvenience.

Now, in my own home, there are serial sleepovers, with us as the hosts. I have given up on fresh linens, although we keep an extra bed in my daughter’s room for her friend Kiki. It is known as Kiki’s bed, no matter who is sleeping there. The other kids grab a spare comforter or blanket and bed down on the comfiest couch. In the morning, breakfast is usually on your own—cereal and milk, gallons of milk. Dinners are often pizzas or a giant pasta dish, easily expanded to serve eight.

I have evolved into a mother of my own making, taking cues from my mother, my friend’s mothers, my dear aunt. Whatever I am is a mix of all they did for me, in the middle of living their own lives, making their own way in a complicated world. Some had a husband to help, more did not. They, too, were making life up as they went along, always trying to do right by their children, never quite sure how it would all turn out.

I know Kay would be happy to know we were together for her funeral and that our friendship has taken a new turn, deepened by another of life’s lessons.

- Cass Collins