Holiday was sitting near the birdbath, panting happily, but he did not notice me. He was watching my mother. She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me. I looked at what I had never seen as anything but Mom and saw the soft powdery skin of her face-powdery without makeup-soft without help. Her eyebrows and eyes were a set-piece together. “Ocean Eyes,” my father called her when he wanted one of her chocolate-covered cherries, which she kept hidden in the liquor cabinet as her private treat. And now I understood the name. I had thought it was because they were blue, but now I saw it was because they were bottomless in a way that I found frightening. I had an instinct then, not a developed thought, and it was that, before Holiday saw and smelled me, before the dewy mist hovering over the grass evaporated and the mother inside her woke as it did every morning, I should take a photograph with my new camera.
When the roll came back from the Kodak plant in a special heavy envelope, I could see the difference immediately. There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click started her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to the loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardener. Sunny neighbor. My mother’s eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. I thought I had my whole life to understand them, but that was the only day I had. Once upon Earth I saw her as Abigail, and then I let it slip effortlessly back- my fascination held in check by wanting her to be that mother and envelop me as that mother.
- Susie Salmon, The Lovely Bones
On the eve of Mother’s Day yesterday, I saw what Susie meant. There was a moment, just a moment when I looked at my mother with such a clarity that took away all that I knew her to be, and replaced her in a light that showed all that she must’ve once been.
It’s always difficult to imagine her with a life of her own before she had us, but once upon a time that was exactly so. She had her own ambitions, her own idea of how she wanted her life to turn out, and although I’ve never doubted her love for us, I sometimes wonder whether it’s all what she had hoped for it to be.
When I looked at her in that brief moment, there’s no other way to describe it but I saw what can only be only be called ocean eyes. I saw her sacrifices and opportunities lost, her patience and countenance etched all over her face, how she’s had to bear sadness and extremities in silence, how she’s taken on difficulties with courage, and above all I saw a girl who grew into a woman who dealt with life’s blows with grace and panache and restrained herself from doing as she pleased to her heart’s content for our sake and our sake alone. I saw a girl grasping at dreams, then a woman quietly storing them away in a drawer, occasionally stealing small peeks at them, but never more. Is this sacrifice something inherent in all mothers?
In that brief moment, I didn’t see my mother but another person altogether, and my heart ached for her, this person who decided that she’d have us, and spend the rest of her life for us, never mind what she wanted. Whatever she got out of what she had now, she’d make do. She’d settle. We came first.
And how do you rival that kind of force, that kind of love? How does anyone?
Happy Mother’s Day, Ummi. I love you in a way that can never match yours, but I love you. God knows only He can repay you in full for all your sacrifices and forgotten dreams, which I pray will come true, if not here on Earth, then in Paradise. Ameen.
God bless all mothers around the world, and yours too.
Enough said here.
