Mother’s Day May 11, 2008
Before I could really enjoy it, it seems I had to fall apart.
So I fell apart last Thursday afternoon, May 8, around three in the afternoon.
I’ve been preparing relentlessly for the weekend of May 16, the much-discussed and long-awaited quadruple bar and bat mitzvah of Helen, Jesse, Fisseha & Daniel. Over 200 guests will join us on Friday night and Saturday at the kids’ Jewish summer camp in North Georgia. A bus will carry their school friends up from Atlanta. Close friends and family will stay at the camp all weekend. I’ve been planning this, increasingly obsessively and with panic, for many weeks, until now it’s impossible for me to do anything else. (At this very moment, hospitality bags are arrayed around my desk chair, and dress clothes with plastic protectors hang from the office closet.) (And I just stopped writing in order to confirm bus arrangements.) Everything else in my life has fallen to the rear as I prepare for this once-in-a-lifetime event, the JumboMitzvah.
The run-up to Mother’s Day began last Thursday morning, May 8. Helen phoned from school to ask that I run $7 up to the school for “a Mother’s Day surprise.” This I did.
Thursday afternoon at three o’clock I arrived home from bar & bat mitzvah errands to discover (a) that the Mother’s Day surprise was a heart-shaped cake that Helen had decorated with plenty of red and pink curlicues, and (b) that she had eaten about a fourth of it, and had invited Yosef to join her, and that only half the cake remained, looking particularly savaged.
I was shocked.
I suggest that if I’d not been running myself into the ground trying to make sure that all out-of-town visitors’ flights would be met the following week and that everyone would have sheets or sleeping bags and that there were Shabos candles up at the camp and that we could borrow 150 prayerbooks and that four children had been learning and practicing their parts, I might have laughed, sat down, and had a piece of used cake.
Instead, I was so staggered by the sight that I left the kitchen in utter confusion. I couldn’t even look at Helen. I thought, heartbroken: “My Mother’s Day surprise!”
I drove to pick up Lily from school and tried to tell Lily on the way home what had happened. “Something hurt my feelings,” I began, but I got too choked up to finish. Helen was supposed to go shopping for dress shoes that afternoon, for the bat mitzvah. Back home, looking away from her, I asked if she still wanted to go. She said no. A bit later I heard Helen tell Lily, “I feel too guilty to go shoe-shopping.” That made me feel horrible, too. I felt: “She doesn’t feel SAD. She feels that I’m making her feel guilty.” In the kitchen I picked up the remaining section of cake and hurled it into the garbage. I spotted the faux-elegant Mother’s Day card provided by Publix Grocery along with the cake, and I tore it in half. Then I went upstairs to my bedroom and lay down, paralyzed with disappointment. I sank into a stillness such as I had not enjoyed for many weeks. I couldn’t move.
“Helen’s love has been one of the purest elements in my life, and now it’s over,” I thought hysterically. I lay there on my bed, squeezed between a laundry basket and an open suitcase, as I’d already begun packing for the b’nai mitzvah weekend. I knew that I was being utterly self-pitying and pathetic and ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it. I lay there immobilized, not even reading, for an hour and a half. My inner lament included, naturally, the concept: “They don’t even miss me downstairs.”
Lily intervened. “Mother!” she scolded. “What on earth is going on between you and Helen? She’s been lying on the sofa crying for two hours and everyone is miserable.”
I told Lily about my cake.
“Mom!” she cried. “That’s not your real cake. She’s going to bake you a real cake. She already had plans to bake you a big beautiful cake.”
“I know that’s not true,” I sniffed, continuing to act like a three-year-old.
I got up and walked downstairs. Helen was flat out on the sofa, buried under the cushions. I went out to the back deck and sat. Again Lily: “Are you pulling yourself together?”
“A little,” I sniffed. “Can you ask Helen to come outside?”
Helen came out, looking red-eyed and tousled and sweaty. She sat across from me. “I guess I got a little carried away,” I said. Her eyes teared up. “Come here,” I said, and she came reluctantly and we hugged.
At dinner that night, the kids were particularly loud and boisterous, even more than usual – great hilarity. I was buoyed by it, realizing that their tremendous happiness was a rebound from the gloom I’d unwittingly imposed on the household by sulking.
Saturday night: Don took many kids to Target, including Seth, who’d arrived home from NYC for the summer. Donny waited at check-out for the children to do Mother’s Day shopping. “Don’t spend any money!” I’d protested, and had meant it, but he clearly had gotten the message that Melissa Has Worked Her Fingers to the Bone for the B’nai Mitzvah, and This Is a Mother’s Day Not To Be Ignored.
“I’m waiting at check-out,” he told me later, “and Daniel was the first to return. He handed me very carefully a sim card” (a portable memory chip for a cell phone) and seemed very pleased with his choice.
“Then Yosef came, with a DVD of ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ in a format we don’t own the technology for.”
Fisseha strolled, in his soccer uniform, across the vast store carrying a gigantic blender. He carried it as if it were the weight of an envelope. He set it in Donny’s basket, then strolled on.
Donny and Jesse picked out a humongous sunflower-yellow house-dress.
Seth and Lily, surveying the goods at check-out, vetoed everything and ordered that it all be put back.
Insulted, Jesse protested: “It’s the count that thoughts!” and even the recent arrivals to America got that there was something not quite right about that.
Everything was put back on the shelves, and Seth took off for the nearby Borders, where he chose a book I really wanted and a heavy-duty pair of wonderful book-ends featuring bronzed books and frogs.
Sunday morning I was sent back upstairs to bed, so that children could parade up with flowers, coffee, juice, and a bagel; and they all piled on the bed watching me eat; and a magnificent two-layer home-baked and decorated cake awaited me downstairs, on a silver platter.
It was a wonderful Mother’s Day, inspiring Yosef to ask, “Is there a day for the youngest child in family?”
"Why did Fisseha pick out a gigantic blender?" I wondered later. "We have a blender."
"Maybe it was part of a display that said, 'Mother's Day Special!' someone suggested. That's probably true. But I also think he was trying to find the biggest, most complicated, and shiniest motherly-looking appliance in all of Target, and that was the thing he found.
