Well, it's Mother's Day, a holiday that began in the grief of World War I as Mothers Day for Peace and ended up beloved of American restaurateurs and newspaper columnists. In The New York Times, international know-it-all Thomas L. Friedman column his space to remember his mother, who died recently at 89. "Call Your Mother," he calls it.
Then there's "Remembering Nana," an illustrated story. I had a pretty good idea where that one was going, and moved on.
"Dial M for Mother" at least has a practical life solution: when you find someone's lost cell phone, scroll through the numbers and looked for "Mom." Call that one and you'll probably reunite the phone with its owner.
I dare say other papers have similar offerings.
What I'd like to see somewhere is a column explaining how one ought to feel toward mothers- or, come to that, fathers, as that day is next month- who are, to a greater or lesser degree, just awful to their children.
Parents who do, or say, incomprehensibly beastly things. Things that leave a kid- even adult ones- even after they'd done their best to forgive- just wanting never to have anything more to do with them. Things about which friends and family say, "go ahead, go visit. Call. One day you won't be able to and you'll wish you could. You're just holding a senseless grudge."
What does a child do with parents who say, "We'll always love you, no matter what," but don't. For whom love turns out to be an especially strict insurance policy, bristling with restrictions and exclusions of coverage. Parents who say "You can tell us anything," and then, taking them up on it, discover it was just a ruse originally designed to get would-be criminals to drop by the FBI on a family holiday to confess all and be sentenced to a lifetime to Christmas afternoons sitting around with the family and looking at their feet in between sudden brushfires of pointless argument.
What does a child do about being middle-aged and feeling guilty about finding some of his/her parent's behavior toward them so inexcusably vicious as to warrant ostracism, yet can't discount or feel ungrateful for how well they were otherwise raised and educated? It's enough to make your head explode, much less pick an appropriate card.
Of course, as Dennis Miller used to say before he went nuts, that's just my question. I could be wrong.
There is nothing more complicated than family relationships. I keep mine in another country so we can all be happy to see each other when we can ;).
ReplyDeleteKnowing somewhat of the particulars of which you speak, I guess I'd just say, "Thank God, then, that there are at least sisters."
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