My First Mother’s Day

Today is my first Mother’s Day.

In a way, it’s also my first Mother’s Day in 26 years. My grand reentry to a world in which Mother’s Day exists.

My own extraordinary mother loved with a love so solid and tender that it defines much of who I am, through both the foundation it gave me and the parts of me her loss ripped away. I didn’t permit my teenage self many indulgences in the wake of her death, but one thing I decided that first May was that I didn’t have to do a damn thing for Mother’s Day anymore. With apologies (but, like, not really? I felt no shame and in retrospect I still can’t muster much) to my grandmothers, aunts and other invaluable mother figures in my life, I have taken Mother’s Day as a bye since 1999. Each year I pretended, to the best of my considerable ability, that it was not happening. Even last year, three months pregnant with twins, I dipped only a tentative toe into the waters of celebration. So much hope can hurt a little.

In my twenties, I remember telling a boy I liked that I hoped to have a daughter of my own one day so that I could again feel that mother-daughter bond that for me had been so important, and cut so short. I recall it was a bit too heavy a sentiment for said boy at the time, but I had already been motherless for nearly a decade and was used to talking about it. And I wasn’t saying “I want a daughter now.” I just meant someday. I have always wanted to be a mother, and always assumed I eventually would be. I figured I’d get married and we’d have several kids. Eventually.

I had no idea then how long I would wait. How hope would become prayer, prayer would become pleading. How time would erode my plans like a river widening its banks, and how new plans would have to be hastily constructed on muddy, narrowing ground. Eventually I started to worry that I was made only to generate longing, as if my longing were powering cities of other peoples’ dreams.

Now, though, we are a spectacle. Me, my daughter, and my son. I think of my mother, and of her mother, nearly every day. Nearly every day, strangers tell me how lucky I am, and I have nothing to say in reply but, “yes.”