My Mother's Day Card (The Extended Version)

How I found strength, identity, and purpose in the echos of my mother's sacrifices

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1880). Temptation. Minneapolis Institute of Art.

I.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about six, I spent the day running errands with my mom. At the time, she was driving a Dodge Intrepid that was one breakdown away from the junkyard.

As we drove from place to place, she played all of her favourites: Stevie Wonder, Tom Jones, Lesley Gore, and some guy named Engelbert Humperdinck. She’d turn up the volume and sing along while we both enjoyed the breeze.

When you work two jobs, errands become the time you spend with your child. Taking a day, let alone an entire weekend, to abandon the to-do list was a luxury my mom simply couldn’t afford. I never minded. I savoured an oil change the same way I did a day at the beach, as long as it was with her. 

Halfway through the drive, my mom lowered the music to talk to me in the backseat. “Honey, did you know that every song tells a story?” she asked, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. 

“Really?” I was floored.

“It’s true! Most songs are stories about love but they can be about anything. Wanna guess the story in this next one?” 

That moment, as simple as it was, changed my time in the backseat forever. I started listening carefully to what the singers were trying to tell me, piecing together words until I could understand the story living inside of the song.

I’d share my findings with my mom, who would act astonished, as though I was the first person to have ever decoded it. Beaming in the backseat, I’d wait patiently for the next song.

My childhood was filled with moments like that. For a long time, I believed they were fortuitous. A collection of action, dialogue, and emotion that just accidentally melded into these perfect memories. Only now, in adulthood, do I see the intentionality behind them. 

Like an illusionist entertaining a crowd, my mother carefully crafted and meticulously executed these moments, mostly for my happiness but also for distraction. She knew I’d eventually have to learn about the realities of that time but until then, she curated my world with magic and wonder and silly car games. 

She was good at it, too. So good, in fact, that I barely remember my father's addiction at all. I don’t remember the separation, or the pills, or the banks changing the locks on our door, I only remember puppet shows and puzzles and the chorus to Isn’t She Lovely. 

My mother treated my childhood like one of those glass terrariums, completely shielding me from the elements of the outside world so that my little ecosystem could thrive and blossom into the things I am today: creative, imaginative, a storyteller.

And like any good storyteller, I can recognize the true protagonist in my own story, which has and always will be my mom.

II.

For most of my life, I watched my mother rebuild herself from the ground up. While most were splurging on bucket-list trips and milestone celebrations, my mom spent her fiftieth birthday with nothing to her name.

My mother’s strength and her unbreakable spirit shined in many aspects of my life but I remember it most vividly in the inevitable conversations we had to have.

“I want to make something very clear Taylor, you are not the first and you will not be the last to go through something like this. Crying won’t solve it.”

“Well what solves it then?” Tears rolled down my little twelve-year-old cheeks.

“Living your life despite it! Someone else’s decisions don’t determine who you decide to be, even if that someone is your dad.” She let me cry for a little longer, grabbing my hand and squeezing it tight. 

“Hold your head up high honey and remember, this is not your problem to solve.”

This is not your problem to solve.

This is not your problem to solve.

My mom repeated that sentence to me many times throughout my life because she knew that hidden within those words was the absolution I so desperately needed.

Absolution from the guilt of being scared of my father’s disease, absolution from the shame of comments made by my friends’ parents, absolution from the idea that I needed to be better so that maybe, just maybe, he would decide to get better too. 

There is a heaviness that is handed to the children of addicts and more often than not, we carry it alone, wondering if and when we’ll ever be able to put it down.

Every part of me aches for those children, even though I am one, because although I know what that heaviness feels like, my mother showed me exactly how to put it down.

III.

“Who the fuck eats eggs without salt and pepper?” 

“What do you mean?” I laughed.

“Some people at work are shoving eggs down the throats of non-verbal residents with no salt, no pepper, no ketchup, nothing!”

I paused, letting her finish.

“Just because they can’t talk doesn’t mean they can’t communicate. There’s a person in there! Where’s the compassion?”

She had just finished yet another double shift and although I could understand why she was upset, I often spent these conversations wondering how she had any energy left to care. 

Day after day, shift after shift, her concern was not about her bones or the ache in her muscles but about the administration of seasoning and condiments on scrambled eggs. 

But really, that is my mother in a nutshell.

Someone who doesn’t think about being selfless but just is, as if there is no other way to be. And who was the biggest beneficiary of this steadfast altruism you might ask? Well, it was me, of course.

Throughout my life, my mother went without so that I would never know what going without really meant. When we lived in lower-income housing, I swam competitively with the children of doctors and lawyers. I never knew a birthday without gifts and with a little help from her and my part-time job, I went to Europe for the first time in my final year of high school.

A few years ago, I assured her that I would have been fine without those things but she quickly shut me down. She explained that it was crucial to expose me to experiences that would shatter the idea that certain things, places, or people were off limits to me. What she perhaps didn’t consider is how this might impact her later on when I suddenly became an overly confident nineteen-year-old.

“I want to study abroad” I said to her casually one morning over coffee. I was in my second year of university and although she couldn’t afford to pay for my education, she let me live at home so I could pay for it without having to worry about rent.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means you like, go to another country and study at their university.” 

My mom had never booked a plane ticket before. Her only trip outside of Canada was to Mexico City in the 70s. She didn’t know how to email, let alone help me with a visa application. To say this unnerved her would be an understatement.

“Where would you go?"

“Sweden” I said, matter-of-factly. 

She exhaled deeply and shook her head, knowing full well I’d be going.

“Show me where that is on a map.”

IV.

A few months ago, I was preparing for an extended trip to Europe and decided to stay with my mom for a few weeks before I left. Most mornings, I sat at her kitchen table with my laptop open, either working or finalizing travel details.

One day, after making me a coffee before pouring her own, she sat down to work on a puzzle while the news played softly in the background. Every so often, she’d glance up at the TV, shaking her head when she disagreed with the reporter.

I looked back at my laptop where I had an assortment of tabs opened: blogs about the Scottish highlands, train times from Brussels to Paris, a google doc filled with a list of restaurants that my mom will never eat at. 

Without warning, I was suddenly lost in a sea of thoughts about the life that my mother should have lived. A life that didn’t force her to work so hard, one where she could have explored her own wants and her own dreams. I thought about an alternate universe where she could have indulged in the privileges that I have. Privileges, I should note, that were only made accessible to me thanks to her. 

When I got up to hug her with tears in my eyes, she couldn’t help but laugh at the abruptness of it all before asking me what was wrong. 

“Don’t you feel angry sometimes that I do all of this stuff and you don’t?”

She laughed again, “No honey, I don’t.”

This felt like my cue to deliver a monologue about my greed and entitlement. I spoke about unfairness, telling her that the only reason I have anything is because of her and that if I was given her life, with all of its challenges and hardships, that I would have folded. 

I told her I’m a fraud, an imposter, someone who claims they can do anything but fails to share with the audience the sacrifices and hard work behind it, none of which are mine. 

I told her about Mother’s Day and her birthday and all of the holidays where I try to find something on a shelf that could make up for all of this. Is it patio furniture? A weekend at the spa? Where can I purchase the restitution she so rightfully deserves? 

Before I could keep going, she interrupted me. “Taylor, you are the gift I’ve always wanted! You are my medal of honour.”

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote, “If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

I am slowly accepting that the indebtedness I feel towards my mother will never go away. It is a bill in a currency that doesn’t exist, with absolutely no way to settle it. I’ve realized that the only thing I can do is pay tribute to her through my own life and my own actions. So I do and I do it often.

I pay for the coffee of the stranger behind me. I call my great-aunt. I chase after someone who left their sunglasses behind. I send flowers when someone dies. I cry when others are crying. When I tell someone I believe in them I do it in the same way she has always told me. I try to be kind when I so desperately want to be cruel because that is what she would do. When I am compassionate, selfless, or generous, it’s almost like I can feel her pouring out of me and onto others.

For too long, I believed that I did not grow up around the things that lead to a significant life. Degrees, wealth, passport stamps… but through the emulation of my mother, I discovered just how wrong I was.

As it turns out, a significant life isn’t achieved by collecting things that only benefit you. It’s by being generous with your words, your time, and your actions. True fulfillment lies in the impact you make on others.

Our conversation ended with another hug.

As I leaned in with open arms, I asked her one last thing:

“Are you happy?”

She smiled softly, pulling me close.

“I am very happy honey, I really, really am.”