Mother’s Day in my family had greater importance than any federal holiday. It was celebrated with an annual barbecue and appropriate fanfare. My father grilled the meats and chicken to the tune of a running commentary on the importance of basting the chicken seemingly continuously. My Uncle Alan made a big bowl of ambrosia, citrus fruit segments floating in the sweetened red wine. My grandfather made his famous potato salad, a secret recipe that may have gone to the grave with him. And from the age of eight onwards, I made strawberry shortcake.
The strong, powerful women who raised me sat laughing in lounge chairs: My grandmother Lillian, smoking a cigarette, the best friend and confident to almost everyone, the person who loved me completely. Her mother, my great-grandmother Nettie Peiken, always proudly standing in all of her 4’10” with the chunky heels, fitted dress, wig covering the hair loss from brain cancer in her forties. The same decade she buried her husband. And then my mother. Fierce, strong, independent women. I grew up believing I could do anything because they believed I could, I would and I must.
Being a mother myself has undoubtedly been the most important role of my life. I think that my children were defining me even before they were born, our souls connected. The four of them are literally my every single thing.
And of course motherhood is messy. Mothers and sons. Daughters and mothers. Trying the best we can to show up for each other. Capable of hurting each other more than anyone else. And yet entwined, interconnected. Sure, this is celebrated as a Hallmark holiday, but only because often we can’t summon the words to describe these relationships. Doing the best we could. Human missteps wrapped in these intense emotions of love and trying.
So Mother’s Day has always been a pretty big day for me. And then in 2017 on Mother’s Day weekend, the surgeons went in and removed what was left of my tumors and declared me cancer free, or in medical speak “No Evidence of Disease!”
And it makes perfect sense that these days are now forever linked to me. There is no question that my kids were my “why” on surviving and just stepping forward again and again.
When I was screaming with pain on the floor of the chemotherapy clinic as they pumped synthetic mustard gas through my veins, a last-chance treatment I later learned many don’t survive, the nurse asked me if I wanted to stop the treatment. “No,” I yelled from the floor, “I promised my son I would take every treatment.”
So here is my Mother’s Day message to all the mothers and daughters, the husbands and sons: sure we fail each other all the time, little slights transformed into permanent bruises. Today is not about celebrating the perfect parents. It is about celebrating the love and the trying, the good enoughs and the on-my-ways. It’s about saying, “I know you did the best you could and that was enough.” I wouldn’t be me without you.
So to my Mom and all the mothers out there:
Thank you.
XO Gavriella
Well done, Gavriella
Beautiful