All of It

The parade I miss, the boys I have, and the one I keep mothering still.

The garden by the driveway wall is past its peak now. The April flowers I chose for Oliver have done their loud and tender bloom and gone quieter.

The forget-me-nots came up sparse this year. They are biennials, and this is a quiet year for them. There are only two bunches. One came up under the lace leaf maple. I have seen them there before. That is where I scattered the seeds.

The other one I did not plant. It came up right by the brick steps, on the path I walk a dozen times a day, between the driveway and the kitchen. It demands my attention every time I pass. There is no easy word for what it felt like to find forget-me-nots somewhere I never put them, blooming exactly where I walk.

The bleeding hearts nearly lost their blooms in a late cold snap, but they held on.

Every plant in this bed I chose to mark Oliver’s window. Every year I forget how briefly the showing lasts. Every year I am surprised again that the plants stay even when the petals do not.

This is the first Mother’s Day weekend I have noticed myself walking past that bed slowly, looking at what is left rather than what was there.

The house is quiet in a way it never used to be on the second Sunday of May.

There were years when this weekend felt like a parade I had somehow ended up at the center of. There were four boys, a full house, and an alive engine that started early and did not let up. There were homemade cards spelled in earnest crayon, the apostrophes missing or invented. There were pancakes that took longer to clean up than to eat. Someone was always laughing about something. Someone was always leaning into me with their whole body.

The morning had a sound to it. I did not know I would miss the sound until I missed it.

I miss it.

I want to write that plainly, because the rest of what I want to say is harder, and I do not want to soften the missing in order to get there. The fun Mother’s Days of the past, the noise of them, the small bodies and the big plans and the way the whole house tilted toward me for a few hours, those days were good. They were tiring and they were beautiful and they were good.

I am allowed to miss them.

This year, one of my sons is a man. He has his own life, his own zip code, his own version of Sunday. One is in college, sleeping in a dorm bed, ordering flowers online and probably forgetting to schedule the delivery for the right day. One is still at home, but home is changing too, the way it always changes when there is one boy left where there used to be a tribe. And I think of one of them when I’m near the garden by the driveway wall, where the petals have fallen.

This is what I have to hold.

I did not know that mothering would ask me to hold so many configurations at once. The mother I was when there were four boys at a table. The mother I am to the man my oldest became, who needs me differently and less often and not in the ways I rehearsed. The mother I am to the college kid, the long-distance mother, the one who has to wait for the call and not place it. The mother I am to the boy still here, who does not need a parade either, who needs me steady while he becomes himself. And the mother I am to Oliver, which is the strangest verb I know, because the verb has no object the way it used to and yet the verb has not stopped.

People ask me sometimes whether Mother’s Day is hard. I never know how to answer. The honest answer is that it is hard and it is good and the hardness and the goodness are not in competition. I have learned to stop putting them in different rooms.

What feels hard to hold is not any one piece of it. The grief is not heavier than the gratitude, and the gratitude is not louder than the grief. What feels hard is the holding itself. The way mothering has become this stretched-open posture, both hands full of different weather, and no one in the picture but me.

The boys do not know all of what I am holding. They are not supposed to know. That is part of the work.

I think this is what mothering becomes when life refuses to follow the script. You stop being the mother of any one moment and start being the mother of all of them at once. The mother who packed four lunches and the mother who packs one. The mother who broke up fights in the back seat and the mother who waits for a text back. The mother who knew where everyone was sleeping under her roof and the mother who lights a candle for the one who is not.

It is so much. It is so much, and I do not want less of it, even on the days when the holding is the hardest part.

This morning I made my tea in the quiet kitchen and watched the light move across empty chairs. I thought about all the Mother’s Days I have lived already and all the ones I have not yet. I thought about the boys I made and the woman the making made me. I felt grateful and I felt sad and I felt full. I let the three feelings stand together, because they belong together now, and pulling them apart would be its own kind of losing.

If you are a mother whose Mother’s Day no longer looks the way it used to, for any reason, I want you to know that the complexity is not a failure of feeling. The complexity is the feeling. The complexity is the love still doing its work, still finding new shapes for itself, still reaching for the children who are here and the children who are not and the children who have grown beyond the version of you who was once enough for them.

We are still mothering. We are mothering the present and the past and the unchosen. We are mothering the empty chairs and the full ones. We are mothering ourselves through what mothering became.

This Sunday I will sit in the quiet and I will let it be what it is. I will miss the parade. I will be grateful for the boys I have. I will walk past the garden where the petals fell and I will say his name out loud, because that is also mothering.

The verb keeps going. That is the part I did not know.