Now I Know What My Mother Was Saying

The kids’ folders come home from school fat with dead-stock papers: permission slips, notices, idle doodles, art projects, completed packets of classwork. I sort through it all, checking their work before depositing it into the recycling bin. On my eldest daughter’s first day of kindergarten, I told myself I would keep scads of her schoolwork as mementos in boxes in the attic, but I underestimated how much there would be. At some point, you can’t hold on to everything, which is a hard lesson to accept. Throwing it all out is disturbing in a symbolic way, a material manifestation of the fear that one is frittering away precious days with one’s children. I comfort myself by retaining bits that strike me as significant, like all of the love letters addressed to me.

Children begin writing about love as soon as they’re literate. They’re cooperating with the adage that you ought to write what you know. “Dere mom,” a recent missive from my 5-year-old read. “I love you so much.” The text took up a whole page, was repeated on the back, and repeated again on a second sheet, each iteration in different shades of crayon, an adorable version of the typewriter scene in The Shining, as though repetition was all she had to convey the degree of her emotions. Of course, these are words that I taught her, and habits of expression I’ve modeled: I have told her that I love her every day, several times a day, since before she was born, tens of thousands of declarations, an almost desperate need to express something too profound for words.

This is an acute frustration. The love for one’s children is overwhelming, so intense that its attendant emotions often register as physical sensations: the blossoming euphoria triggered by the scent of the child’s hair, the full-body warmth provoked by a long embrace, the painful twist in the chest at the mere thought of their pain or fear or sorrow. I receive each of my children’s notes as a shot through the heart—not because I despair that they will someday cease but because the satisfaction of requited love is so transcendent right now. We have a closed circuit, a little private world: I shower them with all the love my soul can conjure, and they do the same for me. How to explain the magnitude of this love? It’s enormous; it’s animal; it’s amoral—the things I would do for the sake of this love, which emanates from some primitive, elemental place. I envision ochre paintings on torchlit cave walls: Did they feel this too, and how did they express it? I read once that most cave art was created by women and children. What did they say to one another?

[From the June 1990 Issue: Mother’s Day]

When I was a little girl, I wrote messages of love for my mother, delivering them on construction-paper hearts all throughout my childhood. Now I spend time contemplating more elegant and mature ways to communicate that same sentiment, because the urge to write her love letters has not subsided. It’s taken on a certain urgency now that I understand the sacrifices she made for me. My mother used to pick me up from day care in paisley dresses or broomstick skirts with slouchy boots, hair hot-rolled and blown out, with the lived-in scent of faded perfume: full glam for an eight-hour workday with a 45-minute commute on either end and then a second shift at home, cooking any number of demanding meals—fried chicken, smothered pork chops, breakfast for dinner with biscuits and gravy—and then helping me and my brother with our homework and loading up the dishwasher, all before she took her makeup off. I used to sit beside her and talk with her while she took her evening bath, watching while she rinsed her mascara off and finally breathed. As I got older, she would call the house landline from her office phone to ask me to peel some potatoes, chop some vegetables, preheat the oven, grate some cheese.

Those requests annoyed me at the time, but they, too, were an expression of her love. The comedy of maternal love is that its seismic intensity is expressed, most of the time, in totally mundane drudgery. I would willingly die for you at any moment. Now come here and let me scrub half a tablespoon of popsicle residue off your face. I always knew that my mother loved me. I didn’t realize the full practical cost of her love until experiencing it for myself, at least in part. I do not travel to an office building with a full face of makeup; I work from home in yoga pants, and prepare simple food gradually throughout the day rather than whipping up a southern masterpiece at 6 p.m. in a frenzied rush. But there are still the loads of laundry and the piles of dishes, tolerance mustered for the hazards of children’s “help” in the kitchen, and time taken to assist the kids in realizing tiny dreams: raising tadpoles and butterflies, planting hundreds of flowers, crafting salt-dough volcanoes with vinegar and baking soda. I didn’t quite grasp the astounding force of feeling layered into all of that until I was the one doing the layering. It’s as though I’ve learned a language my mother was speaking all along, and now understand what she was trying to say.

[Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: In praise of single moms on Mother’s Day]

I’m falling in love all over again. I send my mother texts and flowers and invitations for trips just for us. But the words I find to speak aren’t ever equal to what I feel, and I don’t foresee that problem resolving; if anything, I suspect it will get worse as time goes on and my love continues to change and deepen. But perhaps the point of all these professions of love, of the notes in crayon and the loads of laundry, is to memorialize this feeling, not just communicate it. Every gesture means: Here and now, I feel something for you that is all-consuming and primordial, the full meaning of which can be revealed only over time.