Maureen Elizabeth Tanner Huth, My Mother (1966 to ca 1977)On Mother’s Day, we imagine a celebration of mothers. Yet I celebrate little, and few people, and certainly never either of my parents.
I do not celebrate a day for mothers or a day for fathers, because I do not believe in the related invented holidays, or even in the concept that mothers or fathers should be celebrated. When they were young, my children celebrated Mother’s Day, as their prerogative and their mother’s preference, but I forbade them to celebrate Father’s Day, for I was their father, and I had spent a lifetime throwing away apparently essential cultural concepts that had no purpose or relevance to me, such as religion, the belief in a god that was impossible to prove, or even the basic precepts of society based on practice rather than necessity.  
Societies, certainly, support the continuation of cultural practices as a means to create attachment to the society itself. The rote celebration of Mother’s Day, for instance, reminds us of the importance of mothers, who suffer—and “suffer” is the correct word here—through months of bodily distress and eventual torment to bring each of us into the air of the world. So I do not fight against Mother’s Day, but neither do I celebrate it.
My mother died in 1999. This week, my new doctor, asking me the age my mother died, was guessing my mother had likely succumbed to the illness that wiped out my paternal grandparents by their sixties and attacked my father and siblings, and even me: heart disease. I stopped him with, “She died at 61, but that’s immaterial. She died in a car accident.”
As an adult, I intentionally did not send my mother Mother’s Day cards or gifts. Thankfully, I lived far away from her for the final 16 years of her life, so I wasn’t pulled into Mother’s Day celebrations. I assume I, as a child, gave her hand-drawn cards, that I wrote what society required me to write, that I was a good son. Because I was a good son. I did what I was told. As the eldest, I helped care for my siblings. I worked to solve problems among them. I tried to do good.
And I did all this even though I was the least important child because I was the most necessary. I helped corral a stable of five other children. I cooked dinner sometimes and made pies for dessert. I served, as certainly other siblings did, as waitstaff at my parents’ diplomatic parties. None of this bothered me. As a member of the family, I served it well, and I was happy to.
But my family operated on a caste system, one where some children were favored and others were not—but usually in opposite ways by opposing parents—and where one child was the null child: me. I was actually the most protected child in this system: I was never in dispute. My mother wasn’t defending me to my father with my father fighting back, or vice versa. I was unprotected, but I was also not constantly on trial. When I was in trouble, it was for something I had done, not for being an unfavored child. I was the essential afterthought, which I literally appreciated.
I lived my life as I wished. I explored the forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, streams, caves, and jungles of my childhood. I read for days and days, developing an intellect through unintentional force of will. I wrote and drew and conducted scientific experiments. I lived a life of exploration. I made my own world, and that world is what has made me who I am today: intellectual and idiotic, thoughtful and thoughtless, graceful and clumsy with people, capable of everything, and incapable of anything, driven to move and make, and little more than a machine of watching and creating sense out of the world, a world I live outside of but pretend to reside deeply within.
My parents toughened me for life. They merely toughened me a little faster than my tiny body could take, so I’ve spent my life unmaking my childhood past. As a way to live through that past, I have almost completely forgotten it. I see it in fragments, broken pieces of a mirror reflecting what happened, refracting and distorting the image and light. But I try to remember, so I can interrogate my past without the interference of others.
What did my mother do? Nothing much, nothing much different—I imagine—than what happens in a regular child’s childhood. She loved a few of us beyond measure. She hated others of us with ferocity and violence. She was trapped in her motherhood and her wifehood. She was set afloat from Millbrae, California (our only putative home), to live on most continents in the world. I don’t believe she ever felt at home until she returned to the U.S. to live for good again in the 1990s.
She also yearned for love from us. By the time I was eight or nine, I was opposed to hugging my parents, not because I was opposed to hugging (though I was and still am), but because I knew hugging my mother was a lie, and I tried not to lie. After refusing to hug her at her insistence and then my father’s, my father was forced to hit me strenuously with a belt upon my bare bottom, over and over, while my mother cried at the necessity of such punishment.
That was my proudest moment, the day I became myself. I did not cry. I remained stoic. I took the punishment as a badge of honor, and I spent about the next decade learning never to cry. My mother and father helped me see I had to hide my self and any sadness—merely to survive. So I shut down. (I have allowed, though only rarely, the possibility of crying as release in my last decade, yet I always try to hold it back.)
I sometimes wish I were good enough to allow for charity to my mother. She was never the smartest of us, she was always befuddled by the world, and hers was often a life of suffering—suffering received and suffering given. I’ve become darker with age, less romantic about the concept of parents, but I never wanted my mother dead. She died because she liked to drive the dangerous way home from the grocery. I told her to never take that route because its blind spot was too absolute, the road she would be blinded from filled with too many speeding cars. But she feared the safer way home more than that that dangerous one. A woman, driving fast and looking for her phone on the floor of her car, T-boned my mother’s car, killing her instantly, fracturing her always brittle bones into pieces.
This accident occurred just a few weeks after Mother’s Day. As Nancy and I drove our two children the thousand miles to Tennessee, I did occasionally—but over and over again—regret not sending her a card that year. She would not have expected it, and she would have been happy to receive it. But the card would have been a lie. I always left Tennessee angrier at my family than I was upon my arrival, so I slowed the connection over time, before I cut it off entirely. 
I have collected a few photographs of my mother today, and I am surprised by how beautiful she is. And how her smile in one of the photos is the smile of someone truly happy. I’m glad she was happy sometimes, and I know she helped keep my father in a more human place than is possible of him without her. When she died, my family of origin died—a result long due. I am pleased not to have that family anymore, yet always haunted by the fact that I’m not supposed to want this. 
You see, I can’t go home again, because I never had one to begin with, and, still, I will live within the bounds of that family until I die. It is made up of my blood and character, my frailties and strengths, my knowing and my being.
Come early June, just a few weeks away, my mother will have been dead for twenty years. I wish my mother well, now that she is gone and my words have no meaning for her.
ecr. l’inf.