The senior citizen at ShopRite stood bemused among the racks of greeting cards filled with pithy platitudes designed to celebrate Mother’s Day. He was thinking about his mother.
In his reverie, the Bronx boy’s thoughts traveled to a time seven decades earlier when his mother was the focal point of his young life.
Which of these cards, he wondered, would be especially appropriate for his mother on her special day?
Not many, he surmised. Indeed, his mother would probably have been amused at the flowery sentiment that she rarely received on the other 364 days of the year.
He thought, “My mother wasn’t like that.” And then, for the first time in a long while, he closed his eyes and remembered his Mom.
She never drove a car. She shopped at the A&P and took the bus home with her groceries in shopping bags. Sometimes, he remembers, he would wait for her at the bus stop and carry the shopping bags upstairs to their apartment on Sedgwick Avenue. But mostly he was out somewhere else playing.
He didn’t notice too much in those days. He didn’t notice that the beds were made, that his clothes were clean or that dinner was on the table.
He remembered, though, the night he had the temerity to put his nose to the plate to smell the spaghetti. His mother’s hand shot out like a snake to the back of his head and mushed his nose into the plate. “How does it smell now?” she demanded.
He smiled to himself and thought, ”Yep, that was Mom.”
You won’t find that on the Hallmark cards.
When he could barely breathe during his youthful asthma attacks, his mother would simply tell him to “Take a pill and go to school.”
It was years later when his Aunt Dot told him how his mother would watch through the window, with tears in her eyes, as her son leaned on every other tree just to catch his breath along the way. That’s not in the Hallmark cards either.
He remembers with a smile his father’s observation that while he ruled the roost, it was Mom who ruled the rooster
But times have changed. The necessity of dual incomes, the reality of single moms, the rise of day care and the pressures of a career have changed the demands of motherhood.
It took a long while on the part of the senior citizen to accept the reality of today. And it took him an unconscionably long time to develop the empathy required to accept these changes to his world.
He has finally come around to understanding what mothers have already known for years. Mothering is a responsible and difficult job.
Different now, it is true, in ways we never would have expected but the essence of the work remains as it ever was. Nurturing, caring and loving are still the purview of these caring and selfless women just as it was and ever will be.
And for that, mothers deserve the respect and honors due them every day of the year. ... And flowers aren’t a bad idea, either.
On this special day, my prayer is that all children when they get to be my age (or even before) reminisce on a kaleidoscope of happy household memories, then smile when they lovingly remember “Just Mom.”
John Klumpp
Sparta