Mother’s Day Meltdown

Mothers Day is never good for me. For a decade it was the presence of absence. Look, woman without child here. I would see ripe bellies and think, my body could not do that. Then there was DD. DD arrived in January last year. Our first Mother’s Day, he reluctantly made me a card. He drew a tall ship. “ You like ships don’t you?” I get seasick. My presence was his absence, his absence of his “real Mum.”

This Mother’s Day is different. Some love has crept in, slender tendrils binding us tenuously, vines that climb on an uncertain structure.

We visited my Mum, our weekly gamble. Will she sweetly listen to his stories about school and view me benignly? Or will she scream, call me cruel, be unrecognisable as my mother? Today was a mixture of both. I must toughen up I tell myself, take the good with the bad. The bad is poison, incurable by the good.

Our return home was the official start of my Mother’s Day. A bus trip into the city for Devonshire tea, on the edge of a street market.

Then I asked DD to put on pants.

There was what I refer to as “the tone”, disrespect mixed with resentment, words spat rather than spoken. Today, it was “I’m not wearing pants!”

I decided to have Mother’s Day on my own. I drove two minutes to my local café and daily office and wrote. Writing is my salve. The staff are used to my fingers clattering across the keyboard as I cry or laugh, as my characters appear.

The mandatory chilled musak of a café has been replaced by a persistent dance party doof-doof-doof. I expect the kitchen staff are dancing shirtless, brandishing glow sticks, with whistles around their necks. Overlying the music is the careless shoving of plates into an industrial dishwasher and circular scraping of a large wok. I can’t see that it is a wok, but it is the percussion of my childhood, growing up in my parents’ restaurant.

The waitress Fina says “the iphone is supposed to recognise you with a mask on but they lied.” We are back to wearing masks and social distancing, after one case in our area. I look at the bench with some funky soda bottles. ‘Lemmy’, part of the Good Karma brand, bears a bright yellow lemon, whistling whilst strolling in white sneakers. I wonder what karma he has. He takes the sweet with the sour, the good with the bad.

At a table outside is a family of three. The man, becoming better looking as he ages, has his wife at his right, his son at his left . As he reads his phone, his wife stares towards but not at me, his son strokes his burgeoning beard. They collectively ignore each other. When the father puts his phone away, they are a family, hanging on his words like two coats on a hook by the door.

When I have ‘filled my cup’, as the child psychologist says, I return home. I hope to find a remorseful, quietened child. “I’m trying Mum”, he says. “I know you’re trying.” He doesn’t get the bitter joke. I remind myself that I am the adult. He has no power in this relationship, placed with a stranger assigned to be his mother. He is an Asian with an Afro. It is hard to sustain anger at happy hair.

There is a smell from the kitchen. Not the smell of something off or the putrescence of three days of unwashed dishes. Something else. Three days ago I burned pasta. I boiled pasta in water and, my mind full of heavy thoughts, forgot it. The smell of burning pasta embedded itself into the pores of every surface, like a recalcitrant blackhead.

I lie on the couch beside DD. He plays my belly like percussion, then blows on my face, over and over. He grips me in his thighs, entraps me in a wrestler’s hold and farts. Loud and strong. He wants me trapped in his putrescence. I cannot escape the stench. I feel like a mother at last, the mother of a smelly eleven-year-old boy. We cannot breathe, we are laughing so hard.

I wriggle free, escaping into my room. I pull open the top drawer, where my first son’s unused dummy rests amongst my underwear. The soft grey elephant clings to the green dummy. I bury my face in the plush softness. Stifle my sobs with it. I miss him, even now. I return it to its home and close the drawer. I walk back to the room with the farting, laughing boy.