Hoping everyone had a pleasant Mother’s Day weekend.
The Bride surprised me yesterday with High Tea at Thistle Farms. We had scones and petite sandwiches, tiny quiches and tarts and of course, Tea – Lavender Earl Grey. Since we had both experienced afternoon tea in Canada on recent trips, we felt like true aficionados! It’s rare that I get to spend time alone with my delightful daughter; her life is busy with work and the Grands’ sports activities. I cherish the time we get to walk along the Greenway with her dog Maple, just the two of us, without husbands and friends, and chat like old biddies.
On Sunday I cooked a fairly simple meal and the Bride baked her special sourdough bread. Bob picked up my sister Kay, looking regal for the occasion. The Pumpkin showed her his sketchbook of imaginary creatures and robots, and she praised his incredible imagination. We capped off Mother’s Day dinner with my famous, three-layer-deluxe-carrot-cake and let the Love Bug spread the toasted coconut cream cheese frosting, which is her favorite activity, next to volleyball.
Unfortunately, we tucked into everything so fast I forgot to take a picture! Maybe that’s a good thing?
Remember when we called ourselves the “Sandwich Generation?” We lived in Rumson, NJ juggling young children and trying to help Grandma Ada and Grandpa Hudson while they were still living in the same big, empty, Dover, NJ house an hour away from us. The marriage and family therapist and the woodcarver. We felt like we were stuck in the middle; endlessly playing catch-up with parenting or taking care of elderly parents. Don’t get me wrong, it could be fun but exhausting nonetheless. It’s a familiar refrain. Only, we’re all living longer; sometimes if we’re lucky, into our 90s. And hips break, and memory fades.
So now we’re living in the Club Sandwich Generation! I didn’t patent the phrase but maybe I will. We have new Grandbabies out in California, and we’ve relocated Kay a mile away while her elevator is being replaced in Carnegie Hill. The Twins are learning to walk, I’m learning Mahjongg, the Bride has started her own practice, Bluebird, MD. and Kay is studying T’ai Chi! When I used the Club Sandwich analogy, the Bride asked if we were the pickles!!
And BTW, the Bride was interviewed on a podcast for Mother’s Day about being a physician mom! She talked about pumping in the bathroom after the Bug was born, and now the ER has a lactation room for new mom nurses and doctors. I remember watching Downton Abbey while she was home nursing and doing her patient notes at the same time. Everything stopped at 5 PM at Highclere Castle for Tea! She was lucky to get a peanut butter cracker during an ER shift.
Aging is inevitable. I understand why the Flapper studied Buddhism in her later years. We continue to suffer when we expect everything to stay the same, when we cling to our possessions, when we constantly buy into algorithms that suggest the next best thing will bring us happiness, when we can’t stop comparing ourselves to others. If we become fixated on staying young, we are bound to be defeated by surgery and toxins that will turn us into unrecognizable versions of ourselves. I loved this essay today on Substack by “The Doctor Unbound:”
“’Your suffering does not come only from pain, loss, illness, conflict, or uncertainty. Much of it comes from your demand that life stop producing these things. You are fighting the nature of existence itself.’” Then he explained that peace does not emerge from constructing a perfect life free of difficulty. It emerges from changing one’s relationship to craving, control, fear, and impermanence.“
It’s nice to set aside a day to celebrate our mothers. I think about my Mother every day, how she had to give me up and how lucky I was to land in Victory Gardens with Nell and Jim. I prefer to celebrate International Women’s Day, because just giving birth doesn’t make you a good mother. And not every woman wants to deliver a child into this world. And some people are estranged from their biological mothers. And some women just cannot conceive, no matter the cost or trials of IVF. Mothering in this country is not as easy as it might be in say Scandinavian countries, in fact, it can be quite pickling. We have an incoherent president who calls himself the father of IVF!
On a brighter note, we had a new visitor to our bird feeder this week – the Rose Breasted Grosbeak!
MountainMornings 