Mother’s Day meant little to my mother, Irma. She went along, thanking me for whatever Mother’s Day gift I made for her at school and then always telling me a story about some wonderful time we had had together when I was younger—such as when she had taken me to a carnival at Park Point in Duluth, and there were pony rides, and she put me on a pony, and the pony started bucking, and I just laughed and laughed.
A small memory, perhaps, but I now think that what passes between a mother and a son is not defined by her love in that moment but later, by the echoes of her motherhood. What did she really do? Her touch. Her courage. No surprise, then, that the more I moved around, got out in the world, and had sons of my own, the more I realized how much my mother, Irma, was still with me.
