How can you tell your mother you love her without feeling foolish? I begin to say what my own mother means to me and I sound like a greeting card to myself. The Victorians had a vocabulary for loving mothers and not much ability to make fun of them. We are good at mocking, but very bad at sincere love. Long ago I learned that if I told people how I really feel about them that to post-modern ears it would sound false or like flattery. What is to be done?
If you love your mother, think she is great, think that her hand that rocked the cradle was more important than the hand of the so-called rulers, who will believe you? We assume all the purples in our prose are just painted on, as if there were no real rose, lavender, and other glorious tints in nature. You will be analyzed and so many eyes will roll over you that you will be left with prose as flat as USA Today’s.
Watching late nineties and early twenty-first century television reminded me how much television writers hate their families. Perhaps hating your family is the basis for good comedy writing, I do not know, but my experience says it is not the basis for a happy life. Somehow I cannot find my mother on television: she is real and none of those mothers are, but they have mocked all the real speeches I could make or used them up long ago in commercials.
My mother was kind, gentle, even elegant. She could make poverty genteel, learning fun, and follow an argument all day. She loved the old ways, but was not afraid to challenge any convention getting in the way of spiritual growth. That does not sound real in a society where getting real always entails admitting horrible truths.
How can I say how good my mother was when television has taught me that loving my mother begins (like a late Roseanne episode) by listing her many faults and then, after that painful “honesty, finally a big hug when to the oohs of the audience the kids admit that we are still family and we loved her anyway?”
What if getting real begins by admitting that my mom did the best she could and gave us, on the whole, a happy childhood?
I don’t love my mother for her vices, which were few, but for her virtues which were many.
But it is o.k. to love your mother, it is good for you, and Hollywood writers don’t think you are cool anyway.
Does telling the story of a good mother demean those who did not have one? Society tells me that one of the worst things I can do is to make someone feel bad. I had a good mother and God knows I better hide it or some demographic group, like Hollywood writers, will feel even angrier. So we are taught to dredge up the bad times, blame those times for every single thing we have done badly, and pretend that the time our mom lost her temper compares to the horrific harridans some folk have faced.
Or does the fact that my mother was decent, Christian, and thoughtful give hope? She was not perfect, but on the whole I have nothing about which a just complaint could be made. My mother loved me far more than she ever harmed me and my childhood was happier for her existence. My best memories hover round my family and my mother is a big reason why. I come from a happy family much of it formed by a good and noble mother and God help me I refuse to deny it. Her very imperfections prove that doing one’s duty, following Christian reason and passion can make a difference for the good. If she can make it, then what is my excuse? I know that being a decent parent can be done by real, messed up humans, but I also know that this admission means some readers will turn aside and out of their own pain mutter ‘get real.”
But it is o.k. to love your mother, it gives hope to your neighbors, and their despair will not get any brighter if you join them in it anyway.
I have a good mother and I love her. She stuck by us and by our father through the difficult times. We watched her mature, she was after all eighteen when I was born, and become wise.
Part of the problem is the sheer amount of marketing and story telling we consume. If you see the same story enough times, even the truest of them becomes worn out and tired. It then becomes clever to mock those stories or tell different ones. Too many big hug commercials and when you finally come to giving your mother a big hug, it feels contrived. Having learned to watch life on television, if we are not careful we start watching our own lives instead of living them. We hug our mothers with Hallmark’s words instead of our own.
But it is o.k. to love your mother, she is real and not just a marketing pitch, and cynicism is not what made her stay up late with you when you had chicken pox.
All over America there are good mothers with children who love them. We have problems. . . and I surely have not lived up to the virtues I was taught at home. . . but they were not mostly due to our fine up bringing. We had choices given to us by our loving parents and we misused them, but not entirely. Many of us have righted ourselves and have returned to the paths our mothers taught us. For that our mothers should receive praise and love. They chose life, hope, and love over death, cynicism, and libertine ways. . . at least my mother did and I love her and praise her for it. I rise up from my couch where Hollywood would keep my in a cynical doze and call her blessed. . . and go get some sun and exercise as she taught me.
It is not hard. Use simple words and mean them. Gather your courage, leave the shoulder shrugging, eye rolling side of your personality for the political season when it is merited, and tell your mother, if she was as good as mine, that you love her. Here are mine if it helps:
“I love you, Mom. You were good to us, continue to be a source of wisdom. I appreciate you and I love you. Thanks for getting me off to a good start and being ready to take me back when I blew it.”
