mother’s day. as always.

Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right. Until the day comes when they have to find a florist fast at noon because they had totally forgotten it was anything more than the second Sunday in May. – Anna Quindlen

Or the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Which is today. Mother’s Day in Ireland.

And yes. I forgot.

My mother is miles away, at home in a village in South Derry, which feels very far from Mexico on a day like this. I miss her the way I do every day, but Mothering Sunday sharpens the feeling a bit, the way certain holidays have a talent for doing. Of course I could simply pick up the phone, which I will, in a moment, and slip easily into the comforting colloquialisms of home. But it isn’t quite the same, is it? 

In the photo I just found on my phone, I’m leaning over my mother’s shoulder trying to explain how to use an App. It looks as though I am the one in charge, which is adorable if you know our history.

She has always said not to waste money on a Mother’s Day card, which is exactly the sort of thing mothers say even though they look forward to hearing the soft thud of the tell-tale envelope landing on the floor beneath the letterbox. But f I want to send my mother a card for Irish Mother’s Day, I must rely almost entirely on memory and foresight roughly eleven months in advance, which, as it turns out, are not my strongest organizational skills.

American Mother’s Day is impossible to forget. The reminders begin weeks ahead, with emails from Teleflora, elaborate Hallmark displays at the grocery store, entire aisles whispering at me, Have you called your mother yet?

But by the time those appear, the Irish one has already come and gone.

For years I had a system to outsmart this international calendar conspiracy. In May, while the American Mother’s Day apparatus was in full swing, I would purchase two cards. One for my mother immediately – a kind of consolation prize in case I had already missed the Irish one— and another for the following March, when Ireland would celebrate properly.

It was a brilliant plan.

Except for the small detail that I would place that second card somewhere safe, which turned out to be somewhere between the electricity bill, a receipt for something I no longer remember buying, and the various documents required for Tax Filing Day which, naturally, lands itself somewhere between the two Mother’s Days. It’s an administrative ambush.

When we were children, though, we never forgot Mothering Sunday. Not once.

Our mother was the center of the universe, which meant the day carried a kind of ceremony. My brother and I would arrive at church scrubbed clean and slightly miserable in our Sunday clothes, lined up with the other children at Antrim’s All Saints Parish Church. We would process in a crooked little line to the front, where the beaming Reverend Thornton handed each of us a single flower – maybe a daffodil – to bring back to our waiting mothers.

There would also be a handmade card, usually involving construction paper and paint and glitter that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Those things still exist somewhere, in the box where mothers keep the artifacts of childhood, from those years when everything felt like a small miracle.

Now my parents are alone together in what people politely call an “empty nest,” and I sometimes wonder if my mother ever thinks she’s no longer needed.

She is wrong, of course.

She raised her girl well – strong enough to lead her own life, make mistakes, and occasionally call home asking how to fix them. Mam’s  track record on being right is formidable, though I didn’t fully appreciate that until the year I spent at home with my own brand-new baby girl.

It was the best year of my life.

There we were: me, the baby, and a house filled with sunlight and the sounds of Van Morrison and Them. With her father at work, that baby would be entirely mine for the whole day. High on the intoxicating new baby smell, I would dance around the kitchen holding her like the rarest treasure.

Mostly I spent hours simply looking at her.

Just. Looking. At. Her.

Examining every tiny feature and furrow, every mysterious expression that passed across her face. I searched for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents long gone, and I would marvel  that two imperfectly ordinary people had somehow produced this astonishing perfection.

She tolerated my hovering with patience. Or perhaps she had no choice. This was before she had words, and before she discovered the expressive power of those beautiful hands she waves around today. I used to call it hand ballet.

Most of the time she was a bouncing bundle of curiosity and glee. But when she cried, which newborns are famously inclined to do, I would call my mother and ask why. Why? 

The answer was always something sensible –  hunger, comfort, perhaps just to remind me that she was still there.

But I couldn’t bear the crying.

Against the advice of several well-meaning friends who believed strongly in the concept of letting a baby “cry it out,” I refused. If I heard even the faintest whimper from the nursery, I sprinted down the hallway like an Olympic event and picked her up.

My mother encouraged this.

She reminded me, in the unmistakable way Irish mammies do, that there would come a time when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep and I would not be there to fix it.

She was right.

Of course she was.

On certain difficult nights since then, I’ve wished that we mothers could bank all those hours we spent holding and comforting our children when they were little. Imagine a kind of emotional savings account, where you could withdraw a little extra comfort later when life becomes complicated and storms arrive without warning.

Motherhood doesn’t work that way. Instead, it teaches you that the desire to fix everything – to make it all better – to close the distance and  stop the clocks – is both powerful and mostly impossible. Sometimes we tell ourselves stories that soften the edges of pain. Sometimes we believe we’ve cleverly reframed something that cannot actually be reframed.

Sometimes there are things that cannot be fixed at all.

My mother knows this.

And still she abides.

She remains the first and best woman I will ever know. The one who showed me, long before I understood it, what strength looks like when it is quiet and constant and unwavering.

Years ago, I ran into a group of former students. they were stunned to discover I had a life of my own outside the classroom, a life that included a then-teenage daughter.  They told her that one day she would realize her mother had always been the person most capable of being her best friend. She may not remember that, but I do. Often. 

My own mother has always been that woman for me.

I just didn’t always know it.

Happy Mother’s Day, ma. I miss you.