20 Years of Literary Mama: Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day 2023 has come and gone. For some, Mother’s Day is filled with activity and fun, while for others, it is a day of quiet, reflection, and remembrance. Emotions can run the gamut when it comes to this holiday—sadness, anger, shame, resentment, fulfillment, humor, love. Literary Mama has given mama writers a chance to explore their feelings about this day over the past 20 years. Whatever the day means to you, we hope you take the time to explore those feelings in your writing. Here are excerpts from other mothers with their thoughts on the day.
Mother’s Day Greeting | Poetry May 2019 | Lisa Macaione
I need a card that says, You left
books around, and now I’m a teacher, or
We can’t talk politics, but we love
old houses. On the front, a drawing–
an unmown field, a pasture fence. Instead,
I take one with a tree, blank inside,
where I write, in slanting cursive so much
like yours and Grandma’s, Happy Mother’s Day.
A Working Mother’s Day | Creative Nonfiction Feb 2006 | Sara Schley
I flash back to my first attempt to work away from home nine months earlier. The twins were just over a year and still nursing. I was scheduled to teach a course with my mentor, the management guru and bestselling author Peter Senge. One hundred people from around the world were signed up, and I had to show. The plan was that both kids and my husband would come and spend the week with me in the hotel. I’d be able to nurse the babies in the morning, at noon, at mid-afternoon and at bedtime. The hotel was in Boston where my mother and sister and plenty of friends live. They’d go to the children’s museums, visit relatives, cruise downtown. Joe would get lots of kudos for taking the week off work to be a single dad-of-twins and he would revel in that.
Mother’s Day at the Blackjack Table | Poetry June 2011 | Elizabeth Swados
Every spring I
Tear myself out by the roots
Even if the wind
Turns me into separate seeds
I’ll grow only to be
Torn out again.
Torn out again.
And replanted.
Erev Mother’s Day | Fiction October 2005 | Jean Cavrell
I am part of the past. Grandmothers do not butt in. My Tarrytown daughter and her cohorts, the current generation, supervise the children now.
It is the day of my ten-year-old granddaughter Brittany’s soccer tournament in Dobbs Ferry. All the midlevel girls’ teams from all the Hudson River towns will battle here. Brittany’s team, the Tarrytown Tigers, is scheduled for four games. Their first begins at 9:30 a.m. These days, I do not function early enough to take the train from my home in Manhattan to Dobbs Ferry and be on the field by 9:15. For many years I have leapt up from sleep, at the command of a crying baby or a shrieking alarm clock, fully alert at five-thirty. Retired now, I am given a dispensation by my tall, protective daughter, Beth, and permitted to skip the first and second games and to attend only the two final ones.