The paper her note is written on has yellowed over the 54 years since she wrote it. The ink has faded a bit too. But her words carry so much relationship history, decades of living, so much pain, misunderstandings and yes, love that just holding the folded slip of paper inspires a flood of memories.
I’ve cherished this note from the past, though it is a mere 27 words. She wrote to me, so it is important, and the words she wrote, well, every single one is a gift.
For decades, I’ve kept her note safe and securely tucked under a velvet-covered jewelry case where I keep my best pieces. It waits there for my return just as she waited.
About once a year, I’ll take it out and read her words, “Dearest Daughter – Thank you so much for the lovely flowers and gifts and for spending the day at home. It meant much to me. Love always Mother.” I think she wanted the note to hold as much significance to me as that day had held for her because she referred to herself as “Mother,” a name her children never used – she was always simply “Ma.”
Ma’s thank-you note would have been written in 1968 or 1969, placing me at about 17 or 18 years old. By that point in time, the close relationship I had enjoyed with my mother had changed. I had become a rather bitter teenager and she a rather bitter mother, often at her wit’s end where I was concerned. There were boys of course, but not the type she wanted me around. Ma was right to be concerned for the most part. But I was very headstrong and immature.
The early connection we had forged from her overwhelming need and maternal commitment to keep me breathing and my total, childlike devotion to her fused us together in spite of the arguments that would later scar us. Problems were never solved; they were just ignored until the next big thing came along. As we aged together, disagreements would become fewer, eventually evaporating into the ether of time.
As for Ma, she’d had a tough upbringing. Her father had a stroke as a young man in his 40s, leaving his wife the sole provider for their children. My grandmother must have been exhausted most of the time. I image what it would have been like for her during those years when her husband was helplessly laid out in their front bedroom, demanding attention both implied and explicit.
Ma told me stories of what her life was like before and after her father’s demise. He was a harsh, hardworking, French Canadian immigrant. He fished the local shores, eking out a very modest living. He could rain down terror on his children or go to New Bedford and bring home rock candy during Christmastime.
After the stroke, my grandfather was totally undone. Paralyzed, he was unable to do much of anything for himself. Ma said she was about 12 years old when this happened. With her mother out working one of the many jobs she’d held until the day she too succumbed to a stroke, Ma became a caregiver. She once said to me, “Imagine being 12 years old and having to clean your father’s bedpan … awful!”
The stress and struggles of her early life never really left Ma. She’d recall how completely crazed her mother became with worry in the aftermath of the 1946 gas explosion in Onset Center. Her youngest son couldn’t be found. That horrific event killed nine and injured 60. That missing son had witnessed the explosion but was safe.
Ma could recall in detail how her mother would come home from work and immediately go to her room to remove her coreset. “She’d fling it around the bedpost,” Ma would chuckle. But then returning to her kitchen, my grandmother would cook for her hungry crew a simple but nourishing meal maybe of baked beans and brown bread or a stew with seasonal vegetables.
“My mother was a good cook,” Ma would say. In spite of her feeling culinary inadequacy, I remember some truly wonderful meals at Ma’s table.
Ma had the capacity to love deeply. Her grandchildren brought her joy. She’d lavish love on them. She’d watch them with care and a type of early childhood psychology her own children never experienced.
Insight came to her late in life, and she mourned all she had poorly or not at all done for her children. I would tell her in those later years when she would feel sad over something she now believed she could have done better, “Ma, your children are adults. We are responsible for our own happiness and our own decisions.” Those talks never really eased her troubled mind.
In the winter season of 1968-69, I was still living at home but either working, going to school or spending time with my boyfriend. I stayed away from home as much as possible.
As that particular Mother’s Day approached, my boyfriend’s mother, in whom I had confided some truths about my relationship with my mother, encouraged me to cut Ma some slack. “She is your mother after all.” It was she who told me I should spend that Mother’s Day at home with my own mother. I have never regretted taking that advice.
As the years went by, from that point forward I always made a point of spending as much time as possible with my mother on Mother’s Day. Those celebrations now blend into an overall memory of sentimental cards, flowers, small gifts, luncheons or maybe just taking her for a ride to get an ice cream.
In the last two decades of Ma’s life, I spent hours either helping her with shopping or just going for those rides she’d call adventures. We even took a short vacation to Vermont where she marveled at the tree-covered mountains. I see her now riding shotgun as we toured the north and south shores, Cape Cod, Rochester, Marion and her beloved Onset. I’m so glad we had those times together. For me, as I now creep towards the twilight of my own life, the pleasant memories, thankfully stand out more and more.
Holding that note, written so long ago by a mother who had a hard time saying “I love you,” is her Mother’s Day gift to me every year.
If she knew I still had that note she might pooh-poo it as my being overly sentimental. The truth is, it reminds me that she always loved me even when I didn’t believe that was true. She was, after all, a mother – my Mother.
By Marilou Newell