Mother’s Day
by Anne Stuart
My childhood was not the stuff of dreams. I loved my mother, and she loved me to the best of her ability, but the fact is she didn’t like children. Why she had three of them is beyond me – I think she figured she ought to love them, and post war everyone was having three and four children.
Needless to say, with three children she didn’t want and an alcoholic husband, my mother suffered from depression and rages, and life in the Stuart family was fraught with chaos.
Things finally imploded when I was seventeen, when both my parents were hospitalized and I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. I’d basically cut class the first half of my senior year in high school, and suddenly I had to toe the line. One class, that I will forever bless, was called Personal Typing.
The teacher was a fluttery, elderly woman named Miss Hale, who drew a picture of a tree on the blackboard and would exhort us to “hang our troubles on the trouble tree” while we learned touch typing.
The week before Mother’s Day she decided to teach us how to write cards, folding the paper in quarters, writing a couplet on the outside and the inside.
I came up with something like “Roses are red, violets are gray, my mother is gone, she abandoned me today.” I was being a smart ass, of course.
Miss Hale came around, checking everyone’s work, and when she looked over my shoulder she let out an anguished cry and flung her arms around me, much to my embarrassment. I stayed after class to explain the situation in my nonchalant way, and she insisted I write a kind greeting card to my mother. Sigh.
Some teenagers are just too cynical for their own good.
The happy ending to all this is I became an adult and my mother liked adults, she was enormously proud of me, and I took excellent care of her until she died at 98. Her last words to me were, “it’s my darling Krissie.”
And I never sent her that Mother’s Day card.
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