To Mamma…With Love and Memory

You would think the passage of time renders the memories more faded, more fleeting. It doesn’t. It seems that the near two decades of my mother’s demise resonates in my heart louder with each passing year.  It is so cliché to remember only the good times, the fond feelings of a mother’s love, but when the dynamic is that of two females, the regrets can creep silently in the shadows. You can’t help but think of all the wasted opportunities of a little more tolerance and a little more time. Perhaps that’s just the way the pieces of life’s puzzle in this complex relationship fit. It’s not the same as that of a mother/son or a father/daughter. There’s the opposite sex dynamic at play which sweeps away the mirror causing conflicts and the natural competition that comes, unfortunately, too naturally between a mother and a daughter.

Do I wish I was less irritated by the overwhelming love she had for me? Do I wish my sons were a little less irritated with mine? Of course I do. Sometimes, the conflicts arise from being too much alike and some arise from being just too different. In any event, arise they will. But what doesn’t change, what stays in the heart and the mind and the soul when thinking of her today, is the profound love she had for all of us, even if some of us daughters irked her more than others at times. Her son, though, never did. The sun rose and set on him as far as our mother was concerned and that is as it should be as that relationship is so vastly different. And there are those less enlightened who claim this cannot be. You HAVE to love your children exactly the same. Well, that would be easy if all your children were also exactly the same. They are not and never can be. You love them all, don’t misinterpret, but there are sensibilities in all humans that gravitate towards what we are most pleased by. The trick truly is to have each of your offsprings think they are your favorite. That’s an accomplishment most parents rarely achieve. 

The sibling rivalries that rear their unnecessary heads in so many families are evidence of that. Birth order matters, like it or not. Many second, third, and fourth born spend their lives without the realization that although it matters, it also doesn’t in the grand scheme of siblinghood. It’s human nature to hold the first of anything in life in a certain regard that you can’t possibly bestow on comparable situations. Your first car, your first kiss, your first time at a mall on your own. It doesn’t diminish the fact that it may not have been the best car or kiss or trip, and that future ones were so much easier or better. It will simply always have that specialness of being your ‘first’ and so it goes with offspring. Your first born is your very first stab at motherhood. It’s a double-edged sword, though, in that you certainly weren’t at your experienced best and so the first-born bears the impossible task of living up to the expectations you bestow upon them in holding them in this highest of parental regard. First-borns have to live through your parental training wheels phase; the overprotectedness and the fierce jealous guarding of their love for you, as if sharing it with others is a betrayal of epic proportions. This is something that the later born will never experience. They get a seasoned parent, one more relaxed in their paranoia.  What a treat that is for them being the children of parents who now know they are unbreakable. Thus, the first in birth will often see their younger siblings as having some special license in growing up that they never had and the latter ones will see the first as having some undeserved unique esteem. 

Then comes the temperaments. It matters not that two or three or six people were raised by the same parent. People come with their own built-in personalities, whether we like it or not. Some may be more aligned with a parent’s own and some just may not. Doesn’t make the love any less, it just makes the “like” of the offspring different at times, that’s all. And then there is the very concrete and real time aspect whereby children are born at different times in a mother’s life. You can’t possibly be the same mother against this backdrop. It goes against human nature. A child born to a blushing newlywed bride is not going to have the same experience as one born at a time of sadness or anxiety or financial troubles or marital troubles or grief or loss or any of the life events we encounter on the road. No matter how a mother tries to separate these agonies from her rearing, it just can’t help but interfere. So, when a first-born recounts a memory to a sibling further down the mother’s life road and that sibling has no frame of reference of that particular time, envy explodes and rather than understand the differences, it can manifest into conflict with each other. Sometimes, it even rears its ugly heads for decades. I find it bothersome when siblings stop speaking as adults. I cannot find within myself anything that truly would have the power to break that bond, whether by envy or inheritance, a fitting tribute to my own parental units, I like to think.

And so today, on one more anniversary of her missing from my life, I think of her. I think of the times we had after I became a mother myself. It truly took that for me to finally reconcile the enormous expectations, real or imagined, that a mother bestows upon her first-born child. We were lighter. We laughed a lot during those visits she made from her East Coast home to my West Coast one each year. These are the memories I hold most dear, along with the memories of our five summers in Italy after I got divorced the first time. I loved those few weeks I spent with her and my father at our ancestral home in the Italian Alps each summer. I know that it could not have been easy for her Catholic drenched self to host a divorced daughter in this little Italian town. I didn’t make it easy for her, nor did she for me at times, but the memories in between are precious to me now. 

Another year without her comes to a close now. Another year without the one person on the planet who has your back in everything and who loves you sans boundaries or borders. The one who provides a feeling of safety that is unmatched by any other relationship you will ever have. I think of my own sons today. There are times when I tell them to be nicer to be or you’ll regret it after I’m gone. Would you expect anything less from an Italian mother? I say this more to the older one, but I also know too well what the expectations a first-born saddles themselves with are like, so I cut him some slack, especially when I recognize my own behavior with my mother.  My younger son got a much better version of me. I wasn’t swallowed by the fears of first motherhood. I retired when he was eleven, so that alone made for a completely different mothering experience than this brother had. He was both the second and the last child and reaped the benefits of the secret toast we make to never having to do this again. I try my best to make sure that those different mothers they had as children doesn’t result in misguided adult sibling rivalry. I pray it stays that way long after I’m gone. I strive to mix their memory cocktail with lots of laughter and joy, so that one day they both will have the ingredients to remember their mamma well.