Mothers And Others

The English and American Mother’s Days are celebrated on different dates. In England, it falls in March, and goes back to medieval times, when on the third Sunday of Lent the ploughboys were given a day off from their Lenten fast and sent home to visit their mothers. In America it comes in May, and was invented in the early 20^th century by an energetic West Virginia woman called Anna Jarvis in honor of her own mother; it quickly became so lucrative for the country’s flower-sellers that when Anna’s health failed in her later life, her town’s florists famously paid a portion of her medical bills.

March or May, medieval or modern, the two feasts are now marked in exactly the same way on both continents. Children skip home from school with hand-made cards hidden deliciously inexpertly behind their backs; breakfast is served in bed; families gather; and there are flowers, flowers, flowers.

And rightly so. But I’d also like to take a moment along the way to add, in among the appropriate paeans of praise that this Sunday will bring for mothers here, there and everywhere, a small word for that undersung group of women like me, who, for choice or through circumstance, didn’t become mothers. I guess you could call us the others.

I always assumed that I’d become a mother myself. It was what the women in my family did: they married and produced hordes of children, some of whom liked each other and some of whom didn’t, but that was all right because if you weren’t talking to one there was always someone else to talk to, so you were never alone – much, quite frankly, as you might sometimes have yearned to be. Throughout my own childhood, surrounded as I was by four brothers who sometimes felt like forty-four, the notion of tranquility remained as foreign to me as the surface of the moon.

I remember one shining Sunday in my teens when I had been invited to lunch by a friend who was an only child; we finished the meal, and afterwards she and I and her parents sat quietly beside the fire and read the newspaper. Let me repeat this. We read the newspaper. Undisturbed. No arguments were raging over football on the television. No one was recreating the gunfight at the OK Corral from opposite corners of the living room. No one had hooked up a stereo to blast heavy metal music from the basement to the attic. Just four people. Sitting in chairs in serene silence. Reading. The. Newspaper. I was entranced.

“Do you do this every Sunday?” I asked her in awe.

She looked at me in a way that in a less proper young English Protestant might have been described as kinda funny.

“Why?” she said. “What do you do on Sunday afternoons?”

She had no idea.

But it was the life I knew, and I was greatly looking forward, when I grew to adulthood myself, to producing my own brood of rowdy young ruffians to shatter the domestic peace and bring me flowers on Mother’s Day. Except that God, or Fate, or Loki, or someone, had other ideas. I always knew that I didn’t want to raise a family on my own. And for all of my fertile young womanhood I couldn’t find anyone I wanted to raise one with. And when Mr. Los Angeles and I had at last found each other, we discovered, sadly, that the mother ship had sailed. It turned out we were to be a childless couple.

When we had at last accepted that parenthood was not in the cards for us, we sat down for a seriou talks about the shape of our future. Without children, we obviously would have just a little more time and money than otherwise; the task for us now was deciding where to put that extra where it could do most good.

It was during that discussion that I found myself remembering the few childless women I had known in my own family. These women were different from my aunts, all of whom I loved, but all of whom had children of their own, and were too far busy about their own routine of feeding, squabble-separating, and hurt knee-bandaging to pass more than the most cursory time of day with a wandering niece. The childless women were able to sit and talk to me; and, as a lone girl half-drowning in a family sea of testosterone, I loved them for it.

There was my father’s cousin Eileen, an artist, who had her studio in the greenhouse in her parents’ garden, a magical place filled with light and blessed quiet, where, gloriously, not a shadow of a football nor ghost of a cricket bat, not a hint of a smashed doll or scribbled-over scrapbook, was ever to be seen. Ever.

There was my mother’s cousin Katherine, one of the wittiest people I have ever known, who had enormous blue eyes and rocked a flutingly theatrical delivery, who once responded to a mischievous inquiry as to why her accent was posher than that of the rest of the family with a raised wineglass and a prompt and lip-smackingly proud, “Pure affectation.” Katherine embraced her own eccentricity; she taught me to revel in high camp; best of all, Katherine made me laugh.

There was the family friend we called Auntie Hilde, who really was posh, who during the War had been secretary to a high-ranking British politician who when he died had left her, scandalously, considerably more money than his wife had expected him to. Auntie Hilde lived in a flat in Mayfair with a doorman and a lift, and had a desk with a letter-opener shaped like a dagger; she would ask me what books I was reading, and when, at age 13, I mentioned nervously that I wanted to be a writer, she took my face in both of her hands (nobody took faces in hands in my family) and said, “I know you can do it.”

I am aware – and if I were ever to forget, the ghost of my mother would tap me sharply on the shoulder to remind me – that these women hadn’t given birth to me; they hadn’t rocked me to sleep as a baby, or nursed me through measles or mumps, or nagged me to do my homework, or put meals on the table for me, day after day and week after week, for year after year after year. If I hadn’t known any of them, she would have pointed out, I’d have been just fine. And she’d have been right – I would have been just fine. But by knowing Eileen and Katherine and Hilde, I felt just that little bit better than just fine; I felt just that little bit – not a lot, and not for long, but just that little bit and just while I was with them – sparkly. And that to me made all the difference.

Sadly, I’ll never have known in my own life the agony of childbirth. I’ll never have spent endless hours nursing babies, chasing after toddlers, wrangling adolescents, chauffeuring teenagers. I’ll never be able to look at a face that would have combined my eyes with Mr. Los Angeles’ smile; I’ll never have taken a vacation with someone who had inherited, God forbid, my sense of direction and Mr. Los Angeles’ sense of time.

But if along the way I can have used one iota of the energy I’ve saved by not being a mother to have made another woman’s child feel even a fraction as sparkly, even for just a few minutes, as Eileen and Katherine and Hilde made me feel … well, it’s not my first choice. But I’ll take it anyway.