Happy Mothers Day

Sunday is Mother's Day. It's a day for cards, flowers, chocs, and just telling mom how much you love her, and how much those little stretch marks mean to you she got from carrying you in the first place.

I think of a few women I know on line, who are extraordinary mothers. One who has kept going for her family after her son suicided. Another, a woman who never gave up and kept on going when the entire state of Washington wanted to put her daughter in a mental hospital and lock the door, throw away the key and leave her to rot for 60 years until her natural death.

I want to to make this clear. I am not a mother. I joke about being a cat mother- but it's not the same, unless I was the actual cat who gave birth to my three cats I have shared my life with.

But I do know that motherhood (and fatherhood) are the toughest jobs in the universe. You think the President is hard work? Try being a mom of a toddler, or a teenager, or a baby with the colic. That's hard. How difficult is it to know from the moment the baby is born, mother and father are responsible for it, for all it's needs, cares, comfort and to teach right from wrong. Dr. Joy Browne, a Radio Shrink on WOR radio in NYC says Parents give children "roots and wings".

Roots and Wings. I like that.

Every person I know who is a mother , says the best day of their life was the day their child was born. I can believe that. All pain from labor is gone, when they put that small wrinkled baby in your arms and you take your first look at something that has been kicking you for 9 months. I don't doubt it. The best day of my life was the day I held my best friends new born baby, he was 12 hours old and he still had the new baby smell. He was the most perfect, beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.

And I think of my mom. She didn't know when she adopted me, she was getting a child with a brain different than the other toddlers. I think she thought she was getting a cute, blond haired, blue eyed, child that was slightly precocious. She and my dad never realized in their wildest dreams or nightmares, that this beautiful baby would be different than the rest of the family, uncomfortable around people, prefer the company of a book (indeed reading at 2), make a suicide attempt at 4 years of age, and again in 7th grade. A baby who grew up to be a woman who never felt comfortable in her skin, and always felt, and still does, it's like the whole world disappeared and she is the last human alive and that's OK.


I have caused my mom a lot of heart ache in her life time, she shouldn't have experienced . 5 hospitalizations in psychiatric facilities. 2 hospitalizations for tonsils (they grew back) and one for pneumonia. Several suicide attempts. A crash and burn out in Grad School, where I am still dealing with the loss of my broken dreams. My mom would make a great grandmother, as her mother was a great grandma to my sister and me. And yet, this is something I cannot give to her. Instead she always gave me an ear when I needed it, took me to the city every summer when I hit adolescence for a Broadway matinee twofer- and lunch in some hoity toitey restaurant. How my mom was more excited going shopping for my wedding gown than I was.

Instead my my mother always provided comfort. Comfort when my sister and I were small and we would be driving to visit her mother in Brooklyn, she would play games with us like with the oil depositories on exit 12 and 13, of the New Jersey Turnpike- how many color red cars can we spy? When I had pneumonia, she would kiss me every night and tuck me in and I felt safe and secure like I did when I was a child and wished I could go back to my childhood with my baby teddy and doctor dentons and my mother tucking me in.


Now, even in my most mad, most psychotic episodes, most suicidal, it's for my mother I cry out for. She is like Wonder Woman, and will wave a magic wand and make everything better.

And I feel the old Jewish guilt- I haven't been a good daughter. This illness has robbed me of really knowing my mother, really being her friend. No grandchildren to qvell about.

So this Mother's Day, my feelings are mixed. I love my mother more than anything. I just wish I was more like her. And that includes having a brain like hers, to lead a normal life.I hope I can still lead a normal life. I just hope, she knows this and accepts that. And loves me anyway.