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Talking about the Sunday scaries on Mother’s Day

May 13, 2018

Sundays were born rough.

Someone called them the “Sunday scaries,” which is perfect. Others just call them the Sunday blues—that diagnosis-defying, fog-like funk that comes in on tiger feet. If you know someone who is wild about Mondays, you can bet they get the Sunday scaries. Mondays are rescue missions.

So, today, another Sunday, another Mother’s Day.

I can’t pick up the phone to call my mother anymore. Poor, selfish me. But Sunday was our day to talk on the phone. She was in Florida; me in Maryland, as was our chronic geography.

We had this running joke on Sundays. “You must have read my mind because I was thinking of you,” she would say. I’d say something back along those lines. We weren’t mind-readers. We were having the Sunday scaries.

The world brims with lousy talkers and lousier listeners. My mother was neither.

Like a neutral biographer, she stowed the chapters of my life in all their messy hope. She logged my job changes, relationship changes, address changes, mood changes, hair color changes—her youngest getting gray at 28?! Well, dear, it looks good on you, she would say.

Why do fibs from mothers sound like Valentines? And because youngest children prefer the camera stay on them, I’d lament my gray-then-white hair through the decades.

If she ever got tired of my whining, she never let on. Took some nerve to complain about hair color to a woman in a wheelchair who needed help in the bathroom. Even then she listened.

I’d like to think she taught me to listen, but I have a long way to go on that front. Without her knowing, she did teach me how to ask questions. Hers were personal but somehow never prying—at least they didn’t feel that way after I left home. In middle and high school, I wanted no part of her questions.

Because of her, I came to believe the only questions worth asking are personal. What a gift for someone to lay low in silence just to hear your answer. It’s how people begin to trust one another. It’s how people fall in love, you know. Might be how we stay in love.

If you’re lucky, you don’t wait too damn long to grow up and appreciate your parents. (She would not have used damn and would have questioned my use of it. So, in her honor, a redo.)

If you’re lucky, you don’t wait too long to grow up and appreciate your parents.

So, she and I talked on the phone Sundays about personal things. As the years ticked off, our conversations dwindled. Then what happened—along with every awful thing that happens with an aging parent—is our talks ended. Too tiring, too much, too hard by the end.

Before that, though, in all those years of talking and listening on those scary Sundays, she was there.

In our make-believe meeting of the minds, I would call, and she would know exactly when I’d be calling. I’d wait to hear that opening invitation, that most personal of questions:

“How are you, son?”