Tag: Mother’s Day

Lydster: She’s Not Us

Mother’s Day pizza

licorice pizzaThe weekend before she graduated from college, the Daughter came home. It happened to be Mother’s Day. Since it was Tulip Festival weekend, with its requisite traffic jam, my wife and I took the bus to church. Afterward, my daughter drove my wife’s car a couple of blocks away from church, across from the Washington Avenue branch of the Albany Public Library.

We went out to a nice place for pizza and other Italian dishes, leaving plenty of leftovers. My wife and daughter visited my MIL, while I talked to my sisters on ZOOM. As it turned out, my MIL was sleeping most of the time during that visit, and my daughter nodded off as well.

It got to be after 9 pm, with my daughter finishing a binge of the ABC procedural High Potential. I knew what my wife was thinking, so I said it out loud. “Do you want to sleep over tonight and go back in the morning?” And she did have to return by Monday morning because one of her tasks at one of the other Five Colleges was to put in three hours of cleaning the art rooms.

Wisdom

The Daughter said what I knew to be true. Her driving at 9:30 pm was her prime time. Her mother and I were projecting OUR sleep patterns. Moreover, if she had driven back early in the morning, the sunrise would be in her eyes much of the way. I realized, yet again, she’s not us. And she has generally made good decisions in these situations.

My wife asked her to text ME when the Daughter arrived, knowing full well that my wife would be asleep by the time the return trip was completed. And two hours later, I get the minimalist “HERE.” I gave a thumbs up.

Next time: the graduation from Hampshire College.

 

Mother’s Day learning curve

m,y friends’ moms

One of the interesting tensions about having a kid, our kid, was the perception of the two parents. My wife thought she had a pretty good handle on it, whereas I felt I knew nothing.

Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic. My wife knew there would be some learning curve, but that she’d “get” it. I watched my nieces and babysat a couple of other kids, so I figured that I wouldn’t totally wreck a child – or I hoped not.

The moment I realized we, as a couple, didn’t know something was when we both failed at swaddling. Hospital nurses tried to teach us, but we both sucked as students. 

I think my wife was shocked that she couldn’t “get” it. My response was more nuanced; I figured that if I failed at origami, I’d also fail to master swaddling. It’s not that I was HAPPY that my wife and I didn’t catch on to it; that child had powerful lungs. But it did make me less incompetent. Or we were equally incompetent. 

But in so many other ways, she was and is a very good mom.

Trudy

Sometimes, I think about my mom. She worked outside of the home, often leaving us in the hands of her superstitious mother. How did she feel about that? Did she wish she could have afforded to stay home like many of my friends’ moms? It is true that I knew some of my friends’ moms more than my friends got to know my mom. 

(Interestingly, my dad got to see my classmates, and vice versa, when I was in 3rd to 6th grade  because he came to my classroom every semester to sing folk songs.) 

I often got the sense that my  mom thought she was still “figuring things out.” It could have been a function of growing up with her grandmother, mother, aunt, and at least one uncle, who seemed overly protective, I’ve heard.  Since my mom died 15 years ago, I can’t ask her, alas. 

Because of a found letter

very good grandma

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother-in-law, Joyce, recently, in part because of a found letter. She has moved twice in the last five years, which has to be disruptive. In April 2020, her husband Richard died; a little over a year later, she moved to a senior living center near Albany.

Then, in March 2025, she moved to another location in the Albany metro area. She had to shed a lot of items, so after her last move, a whole bunch of her stuff ended up in our living room.

We came across a letter she had written to the widow of her late son John from March 2004.  She must have made a copy or printed it twice, which I found charming. I did something like that in the ’70s and ’80s, using carbon paper.

The letter was very newsy. She mentioned that my wife was due with our child in short order. The twins had turned three, and the other granddaughter, MP, was a tad younger, but they were all thriving. I recall that she was a very good grandma.

When MP became the first of her granddaughters to get married in April, my MIL was invited. But it would have been an onerous trip. My wife and I took 7 1/2 hours to travel from Albany to southern Pennsylvania.

Two weekends later, the bride and her new husband came to visit grandma, and it wasn’t one perfunctory visit. They saw her four times in two days, which made Joyce very happy. She was also thrilled that the young couple could use some of the furniture that won’t fit in her new space, as she desires to keep the items in the family.

Photograph

Here’s a picture of Joyce’s four granddaughters, probably taken by my late FIL in 2006 or so, and embossed on a handful of mugs. Everyone in the family seems to love this photo. Interestingly, the shortest is now the tallest, and vice versa.

Happy Mother’s Day to Joyce, Carol, Leslie, Marcia, Tracy, Leanne and all of you moms out there.

Real mothers

Undefining Motherhood

I found this piece by Katie Phang of MSNBC: She “sounds off on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggesting stepmothers aren’t ‘real mothers’ during a House Subcommittee Hearing.

Phang: “MTG may try to redefine what it means to be a mother, but she’s wrong and will fail miserably because being a parent is certainly not what she thinks it is. Being a mother is more than just giving birth to a child. It’s about unconditional love, guidance, patience, listening, and understanding. With Mother’s Day around the corner, maybe MTG needs to take a moment and learn what that special day truly recognizes and honors.”

Of course, MTG used her usual scattershot rhetorical bluster, as she did when calling for a “national divorce” to split the country into two.  This time it was to specifically attack Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers head.

Still, I know many mothers who became so in myriad ways. And I’m sure that, for instance, Jill Biden was a mother to Beau and Hunter after their birth mother and sister were killed.

Not that

What’s more interesting to me is an article entitled What Is a Mother? Not What You’ve Been Told. It’s on the website Undefining Motherhood. 

Katy Huie Harrison, Ph.D., notes the pain of reading a book called What Are Moms Made Of? “According to this book, a mother offers ‘Full-hearted hugs from two generous arms. Grace under pressure and know-how calm.’ Sorry to break it to you, world, but a mom is not always ‘full-hearted’ and ‘generous,’ nor is she always ‘graceful’ or ‘calm.’

“Nor is she necessarily the selfless angel we want her to be. When I Googled the question, ‘What is a mother?’, the words I saw most were ‘selfless,’ ‘strong,’ ‘loving,’ ‘sacrifice,’ ‘instinct,’ and ‘never complains.’

“But let me be real with you. Do I consider myself a strong woman who loves my child with intensity and will sacrifice abundantly for him? Hell yes!

“Am I selfless, ever trusting in my supposed maternal instinct, and willing to fully sacrifice without complaining? Hell no!

“And I think I’m a great mom.

“#notjustamom exists for a reason, y’all. Moms do a lot for their children, but most of them do a lot for themselves, and I hope the rest of the world, too.

“No one can fit the outlandish definitions our society has constructed for what it means to be a mother.”

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you moms, however you came to the role.

Generations of mothers

Oneonta is a lot closer than Charlotte

I’ve long been aware of how different my mother, my daughter, and I were raised. My mother grew up with her mother, Gertrude Williams, but also her grandmother Lillian (and her second husband, Maurice Holland), and her mother’s siblings Adina and Edward Yates at 13 Maple Street in Binghamton, NY. She had generations of mothers.

My sisters and I grew up with my parents, Les and Trudy Green, at 5 Gaines Street. But my parental grandparents, Agatha and McKinley resided just upstairs. My maternal grandmother, Gertrude, and her sister Adina lived just six short blocks away from us. In fact, my sisters and I went to 13 Maple Street at lunchtime during the school year and spent much of the summer there as well. It was a fair approximation of having generations of mothers.

The daughter of my wife and me saw her maternal grandparents maybe every six weeks or so. But they were over an hour away. Her maternal aunts and uncles weren’t close by either, though she at least has had a decent chance to know them and their kids, my daughter’s first cousins.

But my birth family was more geographically scattered. My parents moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974. Since my father died in 2000, my father and my father never got to meet each other. My mother and my sisters and niece Alex (daughter of Marcia) came up from Charlotte and San Diego a few times, and I went down to Charlotte with my daughter in 2009, when she was five. She doesn’t really remember my mom, who died in 2011.

So no local familial babysitters on either side except when we dropped her off in Oneonta for a few days.

Jade

The first time my daughter saw her cousin Rebecca (daughter of Leslie) was on television. Rebecca and Rico were on some show called Wipeout. My niece actually came in second. The first time my daughter saw her oldest cousin in person was at my mother’s funeral.

The next time was in 2013 when my cousin  Anne invited Rebecca, Rico, and my family to Thanksgiving dinner. (That was also the last time I saw my mother’s first cousins Robert and Donald Yates before they died.) My family did see Rebecca perform in NYC in 2017, but we spent five minutes with RJ afterward. At least we all had dinner together in Syracuse in 2019; thanks to Shela E. for both of these opportunities.

This explained why my daughter was so annoyed with me, after the fact, that I didn’t take her to the Dave Koz Christmas show on Long Island featuring Rebecca. And it’s why she and I are going to see Leslie singing in New York City in June. Leslie’s coming to my daughter’s high school graduation, and maybe Alex can too.

My daughter recognizes that I want her – maybe she also wants for herself – to better know my (tiny) side of the family.

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