Life After Mother, The Emptiest Day

I look at the calendar for May, see that Mother’s Day is coming, and an old habit makes me think what to do, what card or flowers to get. This is the fifth Mother’s Day when I’ve had to think twice and remember, I don’t have to do anything. My mother was the type who made sure I remembered Mother’s Day every year. I don’t have to remember it any more.

Doing nothing for Mother’s Day — and Father’s Day, coming up in June — affects me differently from any other holiday, because most of the others I’ve long lost any emotional tie to anyway. Those I can let pass without celebration. I can handle letting Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, and even my birthday go by without anything special. Mother’s Day, however, always used to be a time for at least a card or a phone call, maybe flowers or a meal if my health and finances permitted. Now I don’t have to do anything anymore.

In fact I do often send a card or make a phone call to my aunt, who is the mother of my cousins, or I acknowledge some friends who have children. That’s not the same thing, though.

I know about the custom to wear a white carnation on Mother’s Day, to honor your mother who has passed. Mother’s Day always falls on a Sunday, though, and this senior has for many years treated Sunday as a day for staying home in pajamas, taking long naps, mindlessly turning the TV on and off, checking e-mail. There’s no reason to buy a white carnation and pin it on my bathrobe. My Sunday habits also preclude going out to celebrate.

What’s surprising is that I feel such emptiness when I’ve long since been used to being emotionally distant from either parent. My relationship with my mother was not one of love and support — it was more about a smothering kind of controlling, one I’m still not used to being free of. My father, likewise, was someone that could only be dealt with by dealing with him as little as possible. We did “the card thing.”

That the experience of shaking free of “the card thing” would leave such emptiness is an example of the unexpected consequences of dealing with the death of a parent. My empty feeling over not needing to send a card or make a phone call is wrapped in the grief of losing a parent, even an emotionally distant one. When experts give advice about coping with the loss of your mother, they forget to tell you that Mother’s Day may turn out to be the emptiest day.