A Private Holiday Between Mother and Child

I expected to miss my mom the most during the winter holidays. After all, holidays were a BIG DEAL, not only when I was growing up but after I became an adult. In all my 53 years before she died, I never missed a single Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday with my mom. My daughter and I and my sister and her family always, always made the trek west and north to our hometown where delicious smells, fireplace warmth, and mother-spoiling awaited us.

What I didn’t expect was the emotional wallop I felt when my birthday came after she passed away. Certainly as a child, my birthday was treated as a special event. In western New York, where spring takes its sweet time arriving, my mid-May birthday often coincided with our first real taste of spring-like weather. The lilacs were opening, sweetly scenting the air, the big trees that dotted our yard were bright green with new leaves, and my favorite lilies of the valley were bursting in the space between the concrete steps leading to our front door. Each morning as I left the house to catch the school bus, I checked the progress of the lilies’ growth, crossing my fingers that by the time May 16 dawned, they would blossom.

Beyond the flowers, what I liked most about my childhood birthdays was the food because I got to pick exactly what I wanted to eat. For as long as I can remember, birthday breakfast was always Canadian bacon and Pillsbury frosted cinnamon rolls. As I’d watch mom pop them out of their cylinder and arrange the raw dough swirls on a cookie sheet, I would practically wriggle in delight at the prospect of their melt-in-my-mouth goodness a mere 18 minutes away. Twenty perhaps if you counted the time it would take to frost them.  My cake request at night was always angel food with mom’s homemade chocolate frosting. I don’t remember the main course – ever – but the day started and ended with sweet joy.

But once I moved away from home to the other side of the state, my birthday became just another work day. I celebrated with my daughter, usually still inviting the Pillsbury Dough Boy to breakfast. We’d go out for dinner, just we two, riding the bus and then the subway from our Queens’ apartment to the West Village and a little Italian basement restaurant called Carmella’s. We almost always chose the simmering and delectable manicotti while dessert was a fruit tart pastry, artfully topped with my favorite raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I could hardly wait for it to be placed in front of me. And if I had a weekend birthday, we’d plan to do something fun like shopping, riding roller coasters at Great Adventure Amusement Park, seeing a movie, or in later years, attending a Broadway show.

Sure, mom was always the first to call me in the morning to wish me a happy birthday, her voice full of love 350 miles away. She always sent a box of presents in the mail that arrived at least two days ahead of time, usually at work because she knew I’d be there to collect them. One year in the late 1990’s, she picked a bouquet of lilies of the valley from between her front steps, carefully placed them in water-filled plastic tubes florists use to keep roses fresh, and then carefully placed the plastic tubes upright in a wide-mouthed jar. Somehow she rigged her packaging so the lilies were protected on all sides from being crushed; everything was tripled padded so no apparent water leakage would occur and she expressed mailed them to me at work. I will never forget my complete surprise – no, shock – and gratitude as the heavenly smell of lilies of the valley wafted out of her highly creative packaging. I picked up the phone immediately – “You are amazing,” I laughed, delighted as I imagined her executing her plan.

There was one more birthday I would be in her company.  The spring mom had surgery for ovarian cancer, I spent my birthday with her in a chemotherapy suite. It was her second ever chemo session and it was an all-day affair. We packed our lunch at home in the morning and ate sandwiches together as she sat tethered to an IV, poison pulsing through her bloodstream. I joked with her urging that she visualize the poison munching on the errant cancer cells that remained in her body.  She kept saying that it was a terrible way for me to spend my birthday. I considered it an honor and said so.

I had three more birthdays before she passed away. Because I would have seen her for Mother’s Day the week before, travelled to her again at Memorial Day, and joined her for her June birthday, I stayed home for my own, resuming my usual celebratory activity with my daughter.  

So I was unprepared for the wave of melancholia that crashed over me my first birthday without mom. Except for the chemo year, I’d had probably thirty birthdays without her. Why did I feel like pulling the shades, crawling in my bed, and sobbing?  I had plans with my daughter for dinner and a show. It was a Tuesday. This was the norm. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way until Thanksgiving. But I was bereft. 

It was the same the following year and the next and the next. I’d wake up morose and it would linger all day. The days were pleasant enough – often lunch out with a beloved colleague, dinner out with my sweet daughter, a couple of great shopping blitzes, and Broadway plays every single year. The calendars I save as a record of my life document all that. Still forlorn lingered.

I was cleaning out a cupboard of books this year, part of my effort to de-stuff myself, when I came across my baby book. My mother documented my birth, noting that her labor began at 4:45 p.m. on May 16. She went to the hospital at 5:45 p.m., and I was delivered at 11:47 p.m. that same night. I laughed to myself thinking of her short labor – even then it seems I didn’t want to be too much of a bother. She wrote that she had a pudendal block as an anesthetic and that my birth was by axis-traction. Basically that means the doctor used forceps to drag me out into the world. We went home from the hospital six days later or so the baby book reports.

I pondered this in the days approaching my birthday. I listened to the tape I made of my mom talking to me the fall before she died. On the tape, she reiterated, as she had many times throughout my life, how much she wanted to have me. I was her fourth pregnancy over a ten-year period after marrying my father. She’d miscarried three times before a miracle drug of the times helped her to carry to term. I thought about how emotionally and physically intimate giving birth is. A birth is an event that is ultimately experienced only between a mother and her child. Others are there, maybe even in the room, cheering, supporting, and celebrating the big moment. But in the end, a birth day is a private holiday. I have one of those “a-ha” moments when the intellectual and visceral collide in understanding. I understand why I have felt so unfinished on the day of my birth. My sole (and soul) partner in our profound holiday dance is gone.