May 9, 2021
Gilford, New Hampshire
I was 27 years old
Lindsay and Cody came over for Mother’s Day. Lindsay doesn’t usually drive any further than local trips around Manchester and mom and I both told her we were happy to come down to them, but she insisted. We were both concerned how this day might be for Lindsay, her first Mother’s Day since Mia died. That it could be—at the very least—very, very sad. But she seemed in good spirits over the phone and was totally upbeat once they arrived. I made Barefoot Contessa’s mac and cheese and it was already done, cooling in the kitchen by the time they came over. And it was nice to be with mom on Mother’s Day. I don’t think that’s happened since high school. I was gonna pick up a flower arrangement for her but she insisted it wasn’t necessary. Perhaps all the more so because of my unintended gift for her from John Mayer, a gift that kept giving all last week.
It was a gorgeous day so we were out on the back deck. Mom cut up a watermelon that looked anemic but tasted delicious. Dad was at work but got off early, home by 3 or so. Can’t remember what we talked about. Austin’s family, surely. They’re always a fun topic of conversation. But it was nice. And it was nice to see Lindsay at ease and happy and enjoying the day, despite having every right to find the occasion just completely upsetting.
But no sooner than all of us reclined into how nice a day this shaped out to be, Lindsay gets up to use the bathroom and takes a while, only to walk further into the house instead of joining us back outside. Cody goes inside to check on her and then comes back outside, after mom very quietly told me that her heart was racing out of her chest. Lindsay was spotting a little bit. She was on the phone with their hospital. And so the three of us are sitting out there pretending not to freak out. Cody being such a cool customer, mom trying her hardest to keep calm. A fraught couple minutes until Lindsay, smiling, comes out and says everything’s okay. That so long as there wasn’t any pain and the baby’s still kicking and there isn’t any additional spotting, it’s more or less normal. Cody began to cry a little. We all could have. Felt, for those couple moments, like the cruelest thing that could ever happen was happening.
But thank God, it was nothing. They stuck around for another hour or so before heading home. Lindsay texted us later this evening, saying that, during their car ride home, she noticed the baby hadn’t kicked in a while. They stopped for ice cream, something sugary usually getting him the most active, but—still—nothing. A kind of passivity from him she might otherwise have never noticed but, on that day, it’s all she could think about. Until, finally, a little bit later, on this Mother’s Day, Vincent kicked.
May 8, 2022
Brooklyn, New York
I am 28 years old
There’s a certain strain of New York Woman that I get worried about. Strongly accented and heavily fragranced, bountiful in platitudes and rich in humor, she’s brassy, bawdy, bottle blond, and, though not always Jewish in faith, essentially Jewish in spirit. The kind of woman who listens closely to somebody’s sob story and understands that the sincerest sympathy isn’t “You’ll be okay” or “This’ll work out fine” or “I promise, it’s all meant to be'' but rather: “Jesus—that is hahhrrible!” A cutting warmth that could only ever come from someone ethnically Old Testament. It’s no small possibility that I call New York City home precisely because of these New York Women. And I’m worried about them. Because all these ladies who I kind of know but always love—the family friend, the coworker, the stranger on the uptown C—they’re somewhere around 78, and only getting older. It’s a worry I never hesitate to share with my boyfriend. God bless him. Austin, who in response to one of my latest laments about our contemporary gals and dolls just not having the stuff it takes to become my revered women of tomorrow, said to me, “But you know—we all just become our mothers.”
Becoming our mothers. To some, a condemnation. To others, a comfort. But as my fondness for that sympathetic “hahhrrible!” might suggest, I can’t always see the difference between the two. Stoned in my freshman year dorm, I was staring at my reflection in the mirror and found myself saying, out loud to no one, “I see my father’s sadness in my eyes.” I, thankfully, very rarely smoke. But that’s this theory in practice, I suppose. That there’s no fighting, despite our damnedest, these natures and nurtures. Because when I’m livid about an indoor obligation on a “top ten weather day” or noticeably suffering an authority figure I can’t stand, when my consonants get lost after a second martini, when identifying as a blond—I may still look like Brian but it’s so very obvious that I’m all Kristine.
My mother, born in New Jersey, can be something of a New York Woman. It is a state of mind, after all. Because surely so much of my attachment to broads has everything to do with the first and foremost broad of my life. As any modern therapist has surely been trained to stop saying: “It’s always the mother.” But, of course, it kind of always is. Because not only is “the mother” something I’m often discussing at my own modern therapist, it’s also all I’m ever talking about at work. Realizing, and not that long ago, that when I tell these real stories of New York families, that when I explain the unique circumstances of their migrations and the universal pressures to cope and change and forget, it’s never the husbands I talk about. It’s Ramonita, it’s Rosaria, it’s Natalie and Fannie and Bridget, it’s the mothers who I explain were making homes and fostering communities and risking deportation and swallowing so much sorrow. It’s the saloon keeper’s wife who, as far as we understand, must have used birth control—in the 1870s—to put off having a child. It’s the midwife who delivered all five of Jenny’s babies but also would have known what to do, or where to send her, if the reality of feeding one more mouth was more than she could bear. Because even if it is a man’s world, then or now, it took a mother.
And it does feel like a man’s world, and maybe at its cruelest. I wouldn’t try to explain the many reasons why the Supreme Court’s tentative decision to strike down Roe v. Wade is so disturbing, so racist, so wrong. I don’t think anyone’s asking me for that, anyway. But what I can try to explain is how frightening it feels, mostly because of how frightening I understand pregnancy to be. How terrifying it can be for the pregnant person who even wants it at all, the pregnant person who feels prepared enough, equipped enough, interested enough to take on life’s biggest responsibility. The biggest one I can imagine, at least. This Mother’s Day from last year, sitting out on the back deck while Lindsay, pregnant and spotting, was on the phone with her doctor, all of us dreading the worst possible scenario, silent in our sudden recollections of the greatest grief we’ll ever know—it was a kind of stress, a kind of fear I won’t wish on anyone. It is hell. But then Lindsay came back outside, smiling, stepping into the sun. Two months later, Vincent was born. But, of course, with Mia, Lindsay had already become a mother. From what she tells me, what she shares with us, from what I too-rarely ask, it seems exhausting and it seems amazing. The hardest work that amounts to the simplest, and grandest, love. And I think about us, about my family, about Lindsay and my mother, how we’re all so irrevocably shaped by loss while happily nudging this little life along. It’s a perspective I can’t be grateful for, but one I’m happy to know. Feeling certain that if I were to hear this very same story but from some other family, from some other mother, I’d understand enough to say, “Jesus—that is horrible.”
So perfectly expressed. Again, you get me chuckling and weepy all in the same post. ❣️