How to Get Through Mother’s Day When You’re Motherless

As the calendar flips toward Mother’s Day 2018, I’m growing panicky. Not afraid of how I might handle that special day set aside for mothers – the first without my own mother around to honor – but anxious about all the well-meaning people who I expect will repeatedly attempt to steer me toward a requisite display of emotion, unwanted emotion.

Listen closely and you too will hear the band of the concerned and well-intentioned tuning up. The parade of the duty bound is assembling and preparing to high step down my Main Street.

“How are you holding up?” they’ll inquire.

They’ll offer unsought shoulders as leaning posts and ears as landing spaces, reminding me, “You have my number if you need to talk, you know, let it out.” Assuming I (1) have their number, (2) will need a listening ear or (3) – and more pertinently – will need their ear if the need to unload emerges at all.

“I know it must be tough,” they’ll insist, and they’ll be wrong, dead wrong.

That’s because for all the sentimentality the day may bring, I’m setting the table for an emotionally, uneventful Mother’s Day. Perhaps that’s naïve. After all, finding yourself motherless on Mother’s Day can’t help but land a mother’s son in an unavoidable heap of melancholy, right?

Probably. Likely. Perhaps? I’m banking on, needing, that not to be the case.

I require smooth sailing. I expect the second Sunday in May to come and go without any notable shifts in my emotive equilibrium. I don’t want to be a wreck or anything near that. I’ve seen that before. Please not that.

It’s not that I don’t love my mother or don’t miss her fiercely. I do. It’s not that my heart doesn’t ache each time it becomes clear no cellphone call can connect me to her voice ever again. I know this. I live daily with her loss and its permanence, sincerely and substantially.

But, since November, when we set mom in her final resting spot, I’ve successfully managed to emulate those cemetery workers and bury her – not her memory, never that, but the fixation on her absence. I’ve discovered how not to lean into despair through a variety of denials.

Living in a different state from my mother meant intermittent chats while she was alive. We’d speak once or twice a week on average. If much more time passed than that, she’d call with rebuke, reminding me, “Jonathan, I’m your mother. You can’t call your mother?”

Somehow, I’ve managed to transmute that physical distance in life to an ad hoc denial space where I hide now from the reality of her gone-ness. From the safety of here, it’s easier not to dwell on mom’s permanent journey away. Instead, I assign her absence one of those gaps between our weekly phone calls.

It’s been a long while now, but the next time we speak, I anticipate rebuke. This is what I understand, even while fully knowing next time never comes.

For now this works. It’s not rooted in reality, but it works. That keeps the melancholy and despair in check – for now, anyway. That suits me just fine.

The night I learned mom passed away – “expired” was the word my sister said the nurse used – I became disemboweled it seemed. Anything that could pass for composure and decorum evaporated. My insides twisted in knots and I wailed otherworldly sounds that didn’t immediately register as my own. It was unbearable. Not a place I want to revisit, especially not on Mother’s Day.

Instead, I’d rather reside in this dwelling place where I opt out of dwelling on her death. That’s what I’m afraid Mother’s Day might do: I dread how this ship called coping might become unmoored from its safe dock. I need not to remember – just a little while longer.

That’s not always convenient. Sunday, I accompanied my sister and father to the monument shop to select a headstone for mom’s grave. This might’ve been a natural place to become downcast. However, I became fixated on our salesman who spoke with a Russian accent and was a dead ringer for the comedian Artie Lange. Russian Artie Lange kept me on even footing right there surrounded by tombstones and constant reminders of death.

I don’t know who my Artie Lange will be on May 13th, but I need him to show up. I need to fix my eyes away from the grave.

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Jonathan Clarke is a writer and content creator, blogger and communications consultant and a regional Emmy Award winning reporter and producer. He is also a contributor to TheVillageCelebration. Jonathan consults for businesses and individuals, helping them find the best way to effectively express themselves. In his spare time, you’ll catch him singing, writing poetry, shooting photographs and cooking.
To read more of Jonathan’s writing, visit couldntkeepit.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @Jonclarkewrites.