Greetings, friends. Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, the first since she died. All I could think to do in honor of it was to text Adah and say hi.
I like celebrating birthdays and making a big deal out of them, which I learned to do from my mother. I like going the extra mile for my loved ones’ milestone birthdays. I think it’s nice to celebrate people and make them feel special once in a while.
When I look back, though, I sort of wonder if my mother’s emphasis on making a big deal out of our birthdays was about us or about her. She liked to make elaborate themed birthday cakes. Some of them were pretty impressive, like the time she baked a cake in the shape of a globe for one of mine, with the continents and oceans elaborately frosted into place.
Mom truly went bonkers for our b’nei mitzvah parties. But then, she always liked anything that let her show off her talents. Don’t we all, I guess? I marveled at Adah’s masterful ability to retain control of her own wedding plans in the face of our mother’s overbearing need to be involved, to feel needed. Besha and I have confided in one another that our own wedding plans are, shall we say, intrinsically less stressful than they would have been only a year ago.
Our mother also laid a heavy emphasis on gift giving, which was fine when I was a child, but became actually onerous when I got to be an adult and was able to buy myself anything I truly wanted.
“You still haven’t told me what I’m getting you for your birthday,” Mom would say in later years, as the day reared itself into the middle distance.
“I don’t need anything, Mom, it’s fine.”
“No, I have to get you something. What do you want?” As if it had somehow become my problem to solve for her what to get me, in order to enable her to satisfy her own desire to be appreciated for having given me a gift.
Finally I hit on the idea of asking her to buy me an annual national parks pass, which was about the right price in her books for a birthday gift, and it was something I was going to want every year without fail. She got the satisfaction of buying something she knew I would use and enjoy — and she always told me that she thought being out in wilderness was a necessary part of my mental health self-care — and I got the satisfaction of permanently resolving a perennial nuisance.
So I feel like I should be feeling something more on my mother’s birthday than I do, now that she’s gone. Like I should be missing her, the way Adah says she does. But I poll the location where that feeling should live and I come up blank. I feel vaguely guilty.
Then I remember that the mother I knew and loved died many years ago, taken away by chronic illness, but leaving behind a woman with severe mental health issues who was in constant physical pain. Always there are two women in my head when I remember my mother. I have missed the other one for a long time.
I did dream about my mother a couple weeks ago. In my dream, she had come back from the dead, resurrected and restored to health, through some novel and miraculous medical intervention. She was nevertheless upset with me and Adah for having sold the house while she was dead, and she said so. I blew up at my revenant mother in my dream the same way I used to do in real life when she was alive.
“Do you have any idea,” I shouted at her, “Just how much fucking work you left us to do?”
Then I woke up, feeling very disturbed.
Later on yesterday, Keith texted me and Adah (who is away for the summer at her second job) that he had gone to visit Mom’s grave for her birthday.
“Placed a stone at mom’s grave today and said happy birthday to her,” he wrote. “I actually couldn’t find it because the grass has grown in beautifully. Then I found the tea tree oil.”
“I’m glad I didn’t pour one out the last time I was there!” I replied. I thanked Keith for making the trip down to the cemetery.
One might well wonder why Keith would bestir himself to visit his mother-in-law’s grave, the one he waited on hand and foot for six years while she deteriorated, running chores, fetching groceries, doing her laundry every week. The one who, in all likelihood, was not very kind nor indeed very appreciative towards him, more often than not. The one who was really the picture of an unlikeable in-law, if we are being honest.
But I know the answer why, and it has nothing to do, deep down, with our mother. I don’t think my brother-in-law went down to the cemetery yesterday for her, or for me, or for himself even — I know he did it for Adah, purely because she would’ve gone if she had been home. He did it just for her peace of mind.
Adah and Keith’s tenth wedding anniversary was this past Memorial Day. I have been grateful every day of that decade that she found him and hung on to him.
If you are reading this, I am grateful for that, too. While we are on the subject of milestone birthdays, I wish a happy 40th to my cousin Daniel Burnston, who will undoubtedly never read this, but I am glad for him nonetheless.
Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est. Maybe I’ll write about the rest of the roadtrip tomorrow.