Mother’s Day Tribute

understand - birds and how anything can be one if I wasn’t careful - were still fresh in my mind. Fresh enough to not pay heed to my mother’s comment besides a perfunctory skim, instead obsessing over the history of Mother’s Day: Anna Jarvis celebrated it for the first time on May 10, 1908, in honour of her late mother who had passed away in 1905. A three-year chasm between death and remembrance. It took three years of living without a mother for a child to realize how much she loved her. If life hadn’t been long enough to be thankful, how would a day be so?

I didn’t respond. All the words I wished to say to my mother - ‘What is ‘enough’ for you and how do I reach that? Why do you hide behind a window? Why did you lie when I asked you what the poem meant?’ - had taken flight and escaped before I could catch them.

TIMELINE 19: They say love is timeless. I disagree. Love is a time capsule that fits in your palm and reminds you of warm hugs and bitter medicines. Bruises and blush. Memories, all the little things. Love is also a suitcase never packed, a pair of shoes never worn and a door never opened to leave when you should have.

On my 19th birthday, Hieu Minh Nguyen published his poem ‘Litany for the Animals Who Run from Me’. ‘Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful. I should say something nice about the weather. I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls when I step into it.’

When I came across the piece, I tore the page and stuffed it inside a time capsule headed for the past. Hoping that it reaches the twelveyear-old me, needing it to reach my mother even more.

It did.

It made no difference.

Love remained a door that never opened.

Mother’s Day has a history longer than any time capsule can fit.

Before Anna Jarvis, there was Julia Ward Howe and her ‘Mother’s Day for Peace’ anti-war observance of June 2, 1872, where the current Mother’s Day proclamation of appeal to womanhood throughout the world was first sung. The day faded as all days do, until five years later when it was revived to honour yet another loving mother of two doting sons (Michigan, 1877). Before either Anna or Julia was the tradition observed during the Middle Ages where the children who had long left home returned to visit their mothers on the fourth Sunday of Lent. It continued as Mothering Sunday in Britain before Mother’s Day and all but replaced it in practice.

My mother frowned when I told her of this. She didn’t realise the day we don’t celebrate doesn’t have a linear past, passing in and out of shadows like an endless tug-of-war against time. “What do you mean the day was around in some form during the Middle Ages?” she asked, confused.

I was confused by her confusion. “Why not?” I spoke. “If there are children, there are mothers. If there are mothers, there’s a day kept aside for them.”

I could see the 12-year-old me, seeing my mother shaking her head at that, repeating her litany of a day not being enough. But that timeline is neither mine nor hers. Mothers can’t have it all, but they can have this: A day, give or take.

TIMELINE 24: Time capsules are a funny thing. You put what matters to you at present inside a box, hoping it still matters to you in the future, assuming the box doesn’t weather or vanish or decay. A toy stethoscope for a son who has since changed his ambition, wedding jewellery for a daughter who refuses to marry and baby clothes for a woman who will never have a child.

When I told my mother what I thought of love, she disagreed. She believed love is timeless. “Love is sacrifice,” she said. “It’s a suitcase you don’t pack, a pair of shoes you don’t wear, a door you don’t open because you wish to stay.”

And I finally understood how a child becomes a bird if their parents are not careful.

No matter. Time capsules are a metaphor anyway, just like Mother’s Day that we now celebrate.*

We don’t celebrate Mother’s Day where we’re from. It’s a ‘western’ holiday, something that happens to women