HERE’S WHAT WE DID LAST YEAR ON MOTHER’S DAY. Diaper Diva was Mamainwaiting then. My, how things have changed.
What did the women of Park Slope do on Mother’s Day 2005?
I caught my downstairs’ neighbor hiding out on a bench outside the
Mojo reading "New York Magazine," while her husband prepared a Mother’s
Day feast. She looked blissed out and serene. "I’m afraid to go
home," she said. "Afraid there will be something I’ll have to do."
A mother I know dug joyfully into the dirt of her Third Street stoop
garden planting geraniums and flats of other annuals. There was dirt
beneath her fingernails and a look of utter contentment on her face.
Wherever
I went, women wished one another, "Happy Mother’s Day," looking pleased
that some attempt was being made to indulge them, to give them a break
from the usual routine.
We had a late mother’s day brunch at
the Stone Park Cafe, where more than one table had a young baby
strapped onto a dad while a mom ate her brunch undisturbed — happy to
be allowed to finish her food without stopping to appease baby.
There were many multi-generational parties: toddlers, mothers,
grandmothers, even great grandmothers smushed together at tables in
that crowded restaurant that recently earned two stars from the New
York Times.
The staff looked exhausted, eager for the day, considered by many to
be one of the busiest restaurant days of the year, to be done. The
restaurant was chaotic with loud rock ‘n roll blaring: the music an
obvious ploy to get people to eat quickly and leave.
At our table, a fast fight broke out between my mother and sister:
something silly, no doubt. Probably a perceived slight. It threatened
to escalate like wild fire but something intervened: god, the universe,
common sense. Maybe it was just the drink order. Civility was restored
before everyone was even aware of what had gone on.
Mamainwaiting appreciated my gift of a newly revised version of Dr.
Spock’s famous, "Baby and Child Care:" a little light reading before
her trip next week to Russia, when she and her husband will meet their
nine month old baby girl for the first time.
When Teen Spirit saw the book he thought it might have something to do with Spock from Star Trek.
Bro-in-Law made a toast to all the mothers at the table,
including Mamainwaiting, "the mother to-be." To which my mother added:
"Mamainwaiting, as the blog says!"
Here, here.
Late in the day, Mamainwaiting and I drank Chardonnay in her living room
and looked through a box of her photographs. There were pictures of my
son, now a big teenager, as a newborn, a toddler, at his 6th birthday (a
Beatles party), and my daughter, now 8, as a newborn, at her first
birthday, naked on a Cape Cod beach, and on and on…
"It all goes by so fast," I said sounding like every other mother in
the world. "Enjoy it while it lasts," again stating the obvious cliche.
But in that moment, clutching a handfull of fantastic memories, it felt
unbearably true.
