Post #28: A Different Kind of Mother's Day, or not
- Nana Beryl Jupiter
- May 13, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 23, 2020
This past Mother’s Day was probably quite a lot different for you than prior Mother’s Days in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and consequent social distancing. With the incidence of COVID-19 hitting harder on older populations, separation between grandparents and their grandchildren has been reluctantly observed for the past two months in the United States. Honoring mothers and grandmothers who do not ordinarily live with their family members was harshly curtailed. This special day with customary visits, homemade meals, family brunches, and loving hugs and kisses was primarily limited to phone calls, video chats, and online orders of gifts and flowers to arrive by masked delivery. Flower orders were in especially high demand, with florists busier than ever to compensate for lack of normal gifting opportunities.
Admittedly, my Mother’s Day was not a lot different than many of my past ones of late. Although Jesse and I live in a lovely, comfortable suburban home, we are not close to any family in the Boston area. And as I have been describing in prior FinallyNana posts, our only child and grandchild live in faraway Fiji. So I typically have minimal Mother’s Day plans. I try to pamper myself somewhat, restraining from mundane household tasks like the ever-present laundry. And Jesse and I might dine out at a restaurant, but of course, not this year.
Jesse usually buys me a Mother’s Day card and flowers, typically red roses as he did this year. In fact, Jesse almost always buys red roses for any gifting occasion for me, my birthday, our anniversary, Valentine’s Day. He knows them to be a standard in the flower world and rarely diverts from his selection.
Sometimes I try to circumvent his purchase by buying some different flowers in advance of the holiday. Just before this Mother’s Day I bought myself a lovely orchid plant. But the roses came anyway.
When we were newlyweds, I had told Jesse not to buy flowers because we could not afford gifts that would be so fleetingly admired. With that in mind, he attempted to buy me other types of gifts like jewelry or perfume. I appreciated his thoughtfulness but rarely his taste. Being practical, I returned gifts that I would not use. Eventually, I asked Jesse to just buy me flowers, as they tended to be less expensive than the other gifts he purchased anyway.
“But you told me not to buy flowers,” he reminded me.
“I know I did, but we can afford them now,” I explained, as we had become somewhat more financially solvent. And the flowers have kept coming. And they do not have to be returned or tucked away, unused, in the back of some drawer.
Our daughter Stacy, though physically distant from us on Mother’s Day, is conscientious about remembering the day with beautiful flowers, often in colors of my preferred palette. Five years ago Stacy’s Mother’s Day flower arrangement of Rubicon lilies came with a most memorable card, “Happy Mother’s Day Mom from Stacy and Jason." That was the first time our daughter had ever sent a gift to me in tandem with a significant other, portending the seriousness of their relationship. The arrangement was lovely but the card said it all to me.
While many of you have resorted to FaceTime, Zoom, Skype or other videochat platforms to visit with your grandchildren in this time of coronavirus, my visits with distant grandson Cooper are often by FaceTime anyway. We most commonly “see” them around our Friday dinner hour which is Fiji Saturday morning, typically a convenient time for all. So we grandparents can view our 3 & ½ year-old grandson, Stacy usually aims her IPhone at him while talking to us, narrating what Cooper is doing and encouraging him to talk to Nana and Papa. Sometimes he is waking up slowly and understandably cranky about tele-communicating. Other times Cooper might be focused on a movie or busy lining up his trucks and cars.
If possible, I try to be interactive. When he was playing with his manta rays, I showed him the carved wooden ray from my house which came from the French Polynesian cruise we had all taken together. When Cooper is playing with his stuffed puppy dogs, we pull our live springer spaniel Oliver into the picture to make a canine FaceTime appearance. Oliver usually gets pretty excited when we are on FaceTime anyway.
One of my favorite Cooper FaceTimes was a few months ago when Stacy called from a holiday resort on a rainy day. With less distractions during the call, Cooper stayed continuously in front of the Iphone talking to us. At one point, Stacy started to tell me something unrelated, and Cooper insisted, “No, don’t talk. I’m talking to Nana now!” I felt so honored to be the object of Cooper’s full attention. But likely I was pretty much the only screen time he was getting that day.
Fortunately for me and Jesse, we had a delightful visit to our Fiji family in early March, right before international travel became impossible. So as Mother's Day came around, I was not feeling any more separated from them than usual or much different from other families observing social distancing recommendations. My sister and brother-in-law who live in south Florida, for example, last visited their adorable granddaughter Madeline for her three year-old birthday in Charleston, SC in February and have sadly had to postpone subsequently planned visits.
On the Friday in advance of Mother’s Day, Jesse and I had FaceTimed with Stacy, Jason and Cooper. Wishing me a happy holiday, Stacy told me to look out for their gift, expected to arrive on Saturday. And indeed it did, a colorful bouquet of spring tulips from the three of them.
And as a special bonus, I received an extra call on Sunday too. Stacy went home for Monday lunch from nearby work and made a particular effort to briefly FaceTime along with Cooper to say Happy Mother’s Day. That put a smile on my Nana face (which is sadly looking more Nana-like with graying, uncolored hair!)
I have indeed observed that Stacy has made many special efforts to connect us to her son, which I greatly appreciate, especially given our physical distance. And although our mother-daughter relationship has been a relatively agreeable one through the years, I have generally noticed less tension and irritability from Stacy toward me since she became a mother, which I also appreciate and understand. I similarly had fairly good relationship with my own mother, but realize that I became a much kinder and gentler daughter when I became a mother too, and realized the magnitude of the sometimes thankless job.
For most of my adult life, I was usually physically distant from my own mother (now deceased) on Mother’s Day as well, but my sister and I would always confer about a gift in advance and inform our brother of his third of the expense. They both lived with their families nearby our parents, and usually all went to Mother’s Day brunch. I certainly called and wished my mother a happy day.
When my two children were still at home, they might similarly confer and sweetly buy me a Mother’s Day gift commensurate with their youthful financial resources. Although I would certainly have told them, “Good behavior, cleaning your room, or not fighting with each other are also terrific presents, as far as I’m concerned.” That is a direct quote from an article I wrote for our local newspaper in 1989. I was very proud of my first Opinion piece in the Wayland-Weston Town Crier which focused on gift-giving for Mother’s Day, inspired by a workman at my house who observed and inquired about my laundry rack which he thought might be a good gift for his wife. He got a big piece of my mind as I emphatically explained why a household utility apparatus should not be presented as a Mother’s Day gift. Although we all have learned that “it’s the thought that counts,” just a little more thought could admittedly be appropriate in some circumstances.
In 2007 when Stacy was living in Australia and our son Ben was living in Denver, they communicated long distance and sent a lovely arrangement of orchids to me for Mother’s Day.
It was the last Mother’s Day gift I would ever receive from Ben who died several months later. After his death Stacy told me that Ben had been very insistent about sending me a special gift for Mother’s Day. When she told him he didn’t have to be so concerned about that, he had replied, “Yeah, I do,” as if to imply that he thought I deserved it, considering his past difficult behaviors with me.
As you can imagine, Mother’s Day was quite emotionally charged for me for the next several years. At one point I wrote this poem:
When it’s mother’s day and your child has died
There is something very empty inside
There is hardly anyone to confide
About the pain in my heart and the times I have cried
There is one less child to call me that day
To tell me he loves me in that special way
I remember the orchids sent three years ago
They’d be his last gift but how would I know?
It might seem peculiar to compose this in rhyme
But it never had seemed that there was the right time
To pen a celebration poem for my son in his life
I miss loving my son though he caused me much strife
I miss his loving me, and I know that he did
Though his life was in turmoil since he was a kid
The photos in his apartment, those in plain view
Showed love for his family, including me too
Another oft-quoted platitude is that “time heals all wounds.” Indeed, my pain and sorrow about Ben have diminished over the years, although there will always be a hole in my heart. However, a great antidote to that void has been Stacy’s adding to her family and thus giving us a son-in-law and grandson. I am ever so thankful for Stacy’s efforts to keep us all connected though miles apart. And I am also extraordinarily appreciative of the contemporary technology that has made those connections so wonderfully interactive. I imagine that many of you have also been thinking about the miraculous advances in technology as your visits to grandchildren for Mother’s Day, and other days during the coronavirus pandemic, have been primarily virtual. There is nothing like a warm hug and sweet kiss from your grandchild but fortunately we have a fairly good substitute with cyber calls that allow us to see, speak and blow kisses to each other in real time.
Although this whole COVID-19 situation is undeniably disturbing and unsettling, a sense of humor has not deserted us. Here’s a funny post I scooped off Facebook (with a spelling of “Nanna” different from my usual):
So I hope you managed to enjoy your Mother’s Day in the time of coronavirus, however differently you may have celebrated. And thanks for reading all the way to the end of my blog post, which I also hope you enjoyed. I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to leave me a comment on the blog site, or email me directly to Beryl@FinallyNana.com
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