Foolish Weeds

Mom’s thick, boisterous curls almost caught fire when she leaned down to blow out her candles, and my dad leaped forward and pulled them back into his hands so she could take her time and make a wish without burning down the house. I’d never heard of anyone else’s mom blowing out candles on a Mother’s Day cake, but my mom did it every year. "It’s my day," she would say, "So I should get to celebrate however I want. I’ve earned it."

Joey, Molly, and I had all chipped in and bought mom a gift together, with dad’s money, and we stood across the shiny marble counter from her, watching her pull apart the delicate purple tissue paper we’d wrapped it in. Purple was mom’s favorite color, and she let out a little gasp when the paper fell away and revealed the purple and gold hoop earrings and the fancy purple pen. Her fingers glided over the earrings and she smiled down at them, then quickly shifted her focus to the pen.

"Does it write in purple too?" she asked us, and we grabbed her some paper so she could test it out. She gently pulled the top off and placed it on the counter, and it seemed like she was moving in slow motion as she guided her new pen down to the paper and began to write in her swirly, careless way. The purple ink made her curly words seem even more elegant, and she wrote the same word over and over again. Mom, mom, mom, mom. Each new mom seemed even more elegant than the last, and she beamed down at her new toy and the word that had led her to it.

"I picked out the earrings, and these two picked out the pen," Molly said, and then threw her arms around my shoulders. "Because you know, I’m the stylish one, and they’re the bookish ones." She laughed loudly at her own joke, but mom wasn’t even listening. She was still playing with her new pen.

"Thank you, babies, I love it so much. Oh, and these too!" She scooped up the earrings and slid them into her ears. She grabbed her phone and opened the camera so she could admire herself in them, shaking her head every which way so they shimmered and bounced in her ears.

"They look great on you mom," Molly said.

"They do, don’t they?" She reached up and stroked each one. She then shimmied her way around the counter and pulled the three of us into her arms. "Happy Mother’s Day to me," she sighed, and I wondered if Mother’s Day was one of the reasons she became a mom. My mom loved having a reason to celebrate herself.

When I was little I thought being a mom sounded cooler than being an astronaut or a supermodel. If I became a mom then I would get to spend all day gliding around my big echoey house in my silky purple slippers if I wanted to, the ones that were so pretty they could almost be real shoes if they weren’t so fragile. I could go to the nail salon whenever I wanted, not just on special occasions, and come home every day with hard periwinkle shells on my fingers, smoother than anything you’d ever felt before. My idea of motherhood was hours and hours to do whatever you wanted because the father took care of everything else. It wasn’t very progressive, but it was how we grew up.

When I asked my mother what she had wanted to be when she grew up, she said she’d always wanted to be a mother, even when she was just a little kid, and my grandmother confirmed it. It had always been her dream, and so a mother she had become. A mother who cleaned and talked quietly to the children, never ruining her sing-songy voice with unpleasantness, though her voice became rougher the older we got. I’m sure she held it against us.

She still had those slippers I associated with motherhood. She bought them at a boutique in New York City when I was seven when she and my father brought us kids there for a day trip. They used to take us into the city all the time on winter Saturdays when the pools weren’t open and they desperately needed to find something to keep us busy. They dressed us in pint-sized pea coats, cream and navy colored hair ribbons for the girls, fuzzy earmuffs with polka dots on them, and paraded us through Grand Central Station. We were the perfect little family of five, all warm and colorful and braving the big city for a day of being together.

The slippers were two hundred and forty-five dollars, and the boutique wasn’t for children. My father had a shiny, important-looking credit card and my mother had a winning smile. The shop employees never stood a chance. My father neglected to watch us and instead asked to see dozens of expensive watches that he never planned on actually buying, fingering each one individually before giving it back and asking for another one. His children ducked under racks and jumped onto tables as mom sat delicately on one of the store’s blue velvet couches, holding out her size six feet as a pretty red-haired sales lady with a bad spray tan handed her the slippers.

The woman wasn’t quite as pretty as mom was, and she noticed. I’m sure she noticed I wasn’t as pretty as mom, either. Molly was. She was the second daughter and she came out better than me. They had the same bouncy black curls and naturally tan skin. Mom’s lips curled up into a constant smile though, and Molly’s sat in a plump pout no matter how she contorted her face. Mine were just thin. I wondered if the saleswoman felt sorry for me. I did, even at seven, because I could see how mom looked and I could see how I didn’t. I felt sorry for the saleswoman, too, waiting on a beautiful woman and her noisy offspring. I stopped feeling anything at all when the slippers went onto mom’s feet.

Her toenails were white that day. The slippers looked like they were being painted on, deep purple silk with white embroidery, and a smile flew onto mom’s already smile-filled lips. "I’ll take them," she said.

It took a lot for mom to frown, and she never did it with those slippers on. Maybe that’s why she wore them every day. That’s what I thought being a mom was. Slippers and smiles and nothing sad.

The only time mom didn’t wear the slippers was when she was gardening. My mother didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would garden. My dad said she picked it up shortly after I was born. Most women who had just given birth spent a lot of time inside with their baby, where it was clean and disease free and they could bond with their new little wonder in peace. My mother has always been anything but conventional, though, so instead of treasuring me inside she would bring me outside in my car seat, set me up in the grass, and garden the day away while I slept peacefully under the trees. Gardening was the only time my mom ever allowed herself to get dirty and she really went for it, burying her hands in the soil and raising gorgeous plants up out of nothing. In almost 18 years she’d created her own personal Eden, with every kind of flower, tree, fruit, and vegetable you could imagine. The way she tended and cared for her garden almost made her seem nurturing. She once missed my piano recital because she needed to watch over her garden on an unusually cold spring night. Her plants were her children and we were like dandelions, fun to play with every once in a while but ultimately just in the way.

Being a mom meant raising children but ours didn’t really do that. She tousled our hair and answered our questions but she never tried to teach us anything. We could learn on our own, was her philosophy. She wasn’t made to raise children, but she had wanted to make pretty things and watch them grow, so she had three, her own personal plants, growing and coiling around her without any instruction or direction. We were like weeds to her. Beautiful, foolish weeds.

She was wearing her slippers that night, of course, and she padded around the kitchen in them as she grabbed some forks and then slid onto a stool at the counter while my dad passed out slices of cake. "Happy Mother’s Day, my love," he said, and kissed the top of her head before taking his cake into his office with him, leaving the door slightly ajar so he could hear the sounds of his family in the distance.

"Just me and my little creations now," my mom laughed, and we all sat around the counter together, eating cake and celebrating her. My siblings and I started discussing a movie we’d all seen as a family a few nights before, but after a while, I noticed my mother wasn’t really listening. She was staring out the window at all of her plants blowing in the wind with a peaceful smile on her lips.

"How are your lime trees doing, mom?"

She broke out of her trance and smiled over at me. "Not as well as last year, but that’s ok. I love them so."