Saturday, 9th June 2007, 6:43pm
An opinion by:
NoemiWhy Mother's Day can Kiss my Ass by Noemi Lopinto
The last and best Mother's day I ever had was when I was pregnant with Sadie. It was May 8, 1999 and I didn't know it at the time but I would have my baby four days later. I remember I went for a walk in my favourite blue hippie dress, with my bouncing belly leading the way up the Mount-Royal. On the way, a man by the Peruvian empanadas/ice cream store gave me a favourable look, and for the first time in months I felt beautiful. The sun was out, I was over the hump in terms of a hard-ass and lonely pregnancy, and the whole city was a live with spring. People were wishing me a happy Mother's Day, and at the time the phrase had a kind of magic to it, a sense of the unknown, of frightening, tantalizing, loving possibility.
Fast-forward eight years... I hate Mother's day. It is exhausting and stressful. Sadie's birthday falls on that weekend and I usually spend it up to my elbows in birthday cake and sugar-drunk kids. There is this obligation to rest and be treated well, but in reality it never happens. There is also no knowing what kind of relationship my mother and I will have on any given day in any particular year. Mother's Day brings that particular thorn in my side into high relief. It's amazing how the pattern never changes, and yet neither does our ability to rise above it. It's a pain that you get used to, like chronic nose bleeds or poor circulation. In my opinion, the best way to spend Mother's day is away from one's own mother, and away from one's kids.
I usually spend it cleaning up after a birthday party or alone with Sadie with nothing to do and wishing I could have what I see on TV. You know: that boyfriend who buys you chocolates, sends to to the spa, or takes the kids out for the day so you can read a book in a sparkling clean house. Or with that sweet and loving mom, who supported you and cherished you all your life, at a gourmet restaurant in Paris, courtesy of your air miles, or something. I imagine these fantasies are shared with a big group of people all over the western world, all struggling to make sense of reality and keep the comparisons to a minimum.
This year, I am actually shacked up with someone, which brings whole host of other kinds of expectations into the picture. On the day in question, David and I were completely exhausted from, of course, yesterday's birthday party. I had caught some kind of virus and felt nauseated, stuffed up, dizzy and weak. The house was a mess; the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, our bedroom, were covered in icing sugar and wrapping paper. The backyard also had to be divested of popped balloon bits and cheese doodles, the dog walked, Sadie entertained, the stepson taken home, and somewhere in the middle of this day I was supposed to get a card or a nap or a minute to myself, or something crazy like that.
In the middle of doing my morning Yoga tape, which was only making me feel more exhausted, David announced he was going to take a nap. It only took me a minute or two to get mad. Once I was sufficiently revved up, I went to the bedroom and asked David when I could wake him up. He sensed the knife's edge in my question and became angry; I became angered by his anger. He said something about his right to sleep, which is apparently inalienable. I said something about mine. He said something about how I should 'just sleep, then", which pissed me off. I said something sarcastic, slammed the door, and we were off to the races.
Here is the pattern when David and I fight: an event or conflict makes one or both of us angry. He gets insulting and aggressive; I get sarcastic and then I leave or try to leave, which makes him furious. Then he says something so retarded I am propelled away from him like a goldfish from a cat's paw. Then I nurse the wound for hours; he calms down and I cry. He feels bad. I feel unknown and unloved.
Being misunderstood by the most intimate person in your life is a pain that deserves it's own blackened category. We fall in love because we feel understood and accepted for the flawed creatures we are. When the walls go up and the loved one becomes an enemy it's like being left alone in a dark room with a monster wearing your lover's face. It's disorienting, confusing, and painful. I imagine it gets to be the breaking point when the mask becomes all that there is. And I can't help but wonder if that will happen to us, and I will have to go back to my menu of silent abandoners.
I am the first to admit I have tended to date men who were emotional pussies. Over X years of dating, this tendency has generally left me alone at the end of the month. Silent men worked for me, in a strange way. There were few reminders of that place of childhood where I am nine years old, frightened and hiding under the covers, listening to the adults I love lose their flippin' minds. I never fought with my silent types- and if I did the decibel levels always remained fairly low. (On the minus side, I had a hard time getting them to tell me what was going on at all until it was too late.) With the silent types, I was in control because I was the more verbal partner; with David, it's the opposite. He's the one always trying to pry open my shell. But his methods need some refining- the only way I ever saw a clam open up is when it thought it was unobserved. Smashing it against a rock or prying it open with the fingertips only ever resulted in bruised fingers, or a dead clam. But I have been so afraid of recreating my childhood for Sadie that I might have brought a depth of personal pain and investment to each little argument that does not deserve to be there.
After a lifetime of crappy boyfriends, it didn't take much to convince me David didn't care about Mother's Day. I ended up running out of my own house and spending the day swollen with unshed tears. I brought my history with me into the bedroom, treated him like a character from an old play, and as a result had to play myself in a re-run of the same story line, the same tired characters and monologues. I spent the day feeling sorry for myself, alone and frightened about the future, watching Sadie dance in the sunlight in her new birthday dress, just like the year before and the year before that.
The problem with living with other people is we never see ourselves from the outside. We see ourselves as we feel; in other words I see myself as innately vulnerable-how could anyone miss that? But others I have loved have described me as stubborn, angry, antagonistic, sarcastic- shades straight from my mother's palette. David probably feels similarly, and there is no recognition in his eyes when I describe the character whose attributes can best be summed up in a nickname- The Dick. We carry these other skins with us all the time, slip them on when we feel they are needed, and jab away in the dark until the clouds part and there on the battleground is not some monster, but the one you love.
So Mother's Day sucked, again. But in the middle of it all was this bright little spot of sunshine named Sadie, running around Edmonton's Rundle Park by the river, chasing a little blue moth here, holding my hand here, telling me she loved me over and over and basically filling my heart, if not with happiness, then with a kind of peace. I think that is why we have children- they're an organic form of un-ingestable Prozac. When they start to discover the sex appeal of darkness (death metal, David Lynch films, bad poetry) it must be a hard and lonely thing for parents. It's enough to make a person adopt a baby, instead of traveling the world or all that other stuff we said we'd do when the kids were more independent. Kids are living happy pills.
Yesterday, people were once again wishing me a happy Mother's Day. The sun was out. I was not on the mountain in Montreal, but in Edmonton, walking along the Saskatchewan River. The day was similar, though. I came home and David was sorry. I was sorry. And I still have that sense of the unknown, of frightening, tantalizing, loving possibility.
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