For most of us, there comes a moment in which we become acutely and agonizingly aware of how many things our mothers did for us when we were growing up, and how little we did in return. For the poet
Billy Collins, this moment occurred when he happened to glance at an open dictionary and see the word "
lanyard." That simple word rocketed him back to the summer he spent at sleep away camp, and to the red and white lanyard he made for his mother while he was there:
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
If you have one of these realizations while your mother is still alive, your path is clear. Call her up and attempt a stumbling, emotional encomia of her every sacrifice on your behalf, and of the fathomless love you have for her. Almost immediately, she will reveal herself to be your mom in full: dotty, opinionated, forgetful ? whatever. She drives you crazy! What a character.
But if she's dead when you have this epiphany, God help you. The dead have a way of gathering about them a mythic, misunderstood-in-life quality that can make you feel guilty about never having sent Princess Di a little note of encouragement when you had the chance. One's dead mother ? if she was in any way decent to you, if she was even minimally on the ball as regards your care and nurture ? can assume a stature beyond all reckoning.
And so it was, that in the process of clearing out my late mother's kitchen, I picked up her Pyrex measuring cup and saw that it was so old the red lines indicating measurement had worn away completely. Saw very concretely that the woman I had once made cry by returning to college early one Christmas break, the woman who loved me with an intensity that I will never know again, had cooked me so many pancakes and chocolate diamond cookies and stuffed green peppers, had in fact cooked me so many meals ? some eaten cheerfully, some eaten sullenly, many eaten without a mumbled word of thanks ? that her Pyrex measuring cup had been worn clean by a lifetime's use.
I stood in my mother's kitchen looking at that measuring cup, and I thought, "Now I am a person with a broken heart."
Fortunately my sister has been dealing with my histrionics for forty-four years now. She was standing right next to me, and she said, "I take it you're going to keep the cup?"
"Yes," I said weakly, and she put it on the stack of things to be sent to my house.
At home, I unwrapped the cup and set it prominently on the kitchen windowsill, next to a Virgin of Guadalupe candle. I planned to go into deep mourning for several years; the measuring cup was to have assumed a featured role: wood of the true cross.
But it was hard to keep my mind on mourning. My children kept asking for pancakes. And Spanish rice, and trips to the playground, and they kept needing their shoes tied ? tying their shoes became like a part-time job. I began to imagine my own children all grown-up and going through my possessions after my death. They might come across an old shoelace and begin sobbing about all the times I had tied their shoes, and all the times they had run off unthinkingly after I had secured the final knot. If I could tell them something from across the grave it would be, "Kids ? relax! Half the time I was thinking about something else when I tied them."
I might even have to tell them the truth: "Tying those shoelaces is why I had you."
Or, as Billy Collins put it, far more succinctly and beautifully, at the end of his poem about the lanyard he made for his mother:
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift ? not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.