There is a painting in my home that has always been part of my life. A mother holding a child, rendered in bold blues and yellows by a local artist named Jacqueline Rochester. My parents bought it from her when she was a neighbor. Years later, I inherited it. My wife lets me keep it in our home. I am not someone who is moved by a great deal of art. I am moved by this one.
It hangs in the main room. At some point, Mother’s Day flowers ended up on either side of it without anyone planning it. Two bouquets framing a mother and child. It seemed right to leave them there. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Early in life, the assumption built into all of it, the cards, the brunches, the flower displays waiting near every grocery store entrance, is that you only have one mother to think about. That is true for a while. Then life keeps moving and the math changes.
There are several mothers in my life, each of whom gave me something the others could not. Every second Sunday in May, I think about all of them.
My mother was everything a young child could want. Caring, compassionate, creative, kind. She made my lunch every day, always my favorite foods. When dinner came, she cooked multiple meals to keep all of us happy. My father, who grew up in a time when food was not always plentiful, would have told us to eat what was in front of us and be grateful. My mother just cooked another meal.
It was early June when a flash flood devastated my hometown. Two hundred and thirty-eight people died in a matter of hours. I was four years old, so my memories are not complete. I remember pieces. Bridges washed out. Cars upside down in department stores. Water and sewer service gone. Close family friends lost their home and lived with us for six or eight weeks. We shared what we had. When we needed drinking water, we drove to an elementary school where tanker trucks had been set up for families. Standing in line filling jugs should have felt strange or frightening. My mother made it feel like an adventure. She made turning on a faucet sound dull by comparison. What four-year-old gets to drive to a school to pick up water?
Looking back now, I realize the same qualities that made her a good mother also made her good on television. “A Woman’s Touch With Mary Ann” was a local talk show, and she was its host. Before tapings, I watched her settle nervous guests with conversation. She made them comfortable. She treated them like they were the most important person in the world, and for those few minutes, maybe they were. She interviewed Phil Donahue, Bob Hope, and, before much of the country understood what it was seeing, Oprah Winfrey. I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if she had been born in a different era or found her way to a bigger market earlier. She never wondered out loud. She may have known it. She never let on.
When South Dakota decided to close the institution where both of my brothers lived, one for twenty-five years and the other for nearly fifteen, my mother went to work. She wrote letters, made calls, cornered politicians, and fought for her sons the way only a mother can fight when she has nothing to lose and everything to protect. In the end, the institution closed anyway. She did not win. But by the end of it, the governor knew exactly who she was. For a mother fighting for her kids, that is not nothing.
In late April and early May, the pasque flower bloomed across our property in the Black Hills. Purple and low to the ground, the first sign winter had finally loosened its grip. Every spring I picked bouquets for my mother without being asked. What I did not know at the time, or perhaps did not care about, was that the pasque flower is the South Dakota state flower, and picking it is technically illegal. I was out there committing crimes for my mother on a seasonal basis. She never once mentioned it. She took those bouquets like they were the greatest gift she had ever received, and she made me feel like maybe they were. Even in college, if I happened to be home at the right time, I still picked them. Some habits survive childhood intact.
She wasn’t there the day I was born, but she is the beginning of every memory I have. She is my original Mother’s Day. She’s gone now. But every May she returns a little.
Maybe that is part of getting older. You realize the people you have lost are not gone in any practical sense. They remain in habits, stories, meals, flowers, holidays, and even the objects sitting quietly in your home. Mother’s Day stopped being simple for me a long time ago because eventually I realized there was another mother thinking about me too.
In the summer of 1968, a twenty-year-old junior at Florida State University arrived in Sioux Falls alone, unmarried, and pregnant. In that era, those facts carried their own social sentence. She lived in a basement apartment for four months. She sewed clothes. She read books. She watched baseball. When the time came, nurses took the baby before she could hold him. She knew only that he was a boy. Then she went home and rebuilt her life. She married, had children, built a career, and kept the secret for fifty years. The hardest days, she later told me, were Christmas, Mother’s Day, and June 15th, the birthday she knew was being celebrated somewhere by someone.
That boy was me.
I found Sandi the way people find things now. A DNA test led to a first cousin match, some internet sleuthing, and eventually, to her. The letter I wrote her took nearly two weeks. I gave her every possible exit because I did not know what waited on the other side. On Christmas Eve 2018, I was standing in a Hy-Vee checkout line, already irritated about something I can no longer remember, when I checked my phone and saw an email subject line that read “Happy Christmas.” I left the cart where it was and walked to my car. I sat there reading the words of a woman I had never met, a woman who had thought about me every Christmas for half a century. At some point I started crying. By the time I drove home, whatever had irritated me ten minutes earlier had completely disappeared.
We met in North Carolina the following spring. She saw me come through the airport terminal and recognized me instantly. To anyone watching, the resemblance probably made the whole thing obvious. She held me the way she had not been allowed to hold me fifty years earlier. For most of my life, adoption had felt abstract to me, almost administrative. A fact more than a feeling. Meeting Sandi rearranged that.
Sandi gave me two things no one else could give. She gave me life. And she gave me up so I could have a better one. I did not understand the size of that decision until I became a parent myself. Both required courage. Both were acts of love. It took me five decades to understand that, but I understand it now.
The painting changed a little after that. For years I had mostly seen comfort in it. After finding Sandi, I started noticing the grip in the mother’s arms.
I did not get to choose the first two women in this story. They came to me the way most things in life do, through circumstance, timing, and decisions made by others. Wanda I chose. She chose me back. What followed has been the great gift of my life, and I have never once found the words adequate to describe her.
Wanda is not a June Cleaver mother. She didn’t bring treats to the ball games. But she made sure her boys got there, on time, with every piece of equipment they needed, which anyone who has ever tried to get a child out the door for a game knows is no small thing. She grew up with only a sister. Boys were not part of her original instruction manual. She figured it out anyway. I’d like to think I helped with the translation.
What she did was harder and quieter than the performing version of motherhood, and she never pretended otherwise. She led by example. She became a role model for her boys without any of them noticing it was happening, which is the only way that actually works.
She protected them, even from me. There were moments when I had something to say and she would suggest another approach. She was right. Every time. Her version of mothering was never hovering. She let her boys figure things out on their own, which takes more restraint than most people realize. When they needed to be challenged, she challenged them. When they needed to be held accountable, she held them accountable. She had a gift I never fully mastered. She could chew them out and motivate them in the same breath. I could only manage the first part.
There is one moment, though, that I come back to more than any other. Our oldest was seven years old when he hit a tree on a ski slope and cracked his skull. We had just found out we were pregnant with our youngest. The doctors were careful with their words. The next 48 hours would be key. That was all they could tell us.
The first night, the two of us folded ourselves into a single recliner in that hospital room, holding each other, not saying much. There wasn’t much to say. Outside the window, the world was going about its business. Inside that room, everything had narrowed down to the sound of a monitor and a seven-year-old’s breathing.
She stayed. The second night, she insisted I go to the hotel. One of us needed real rest, she said. One of us needed to be ready for whatever came next. She had already decided it wasn’t going to be her turn to step back. She sat awake through the night carrying one child while watching over another, and she did it without drama, without complaint, without asking anyone to notice.
We knew he was going to be fine when he started trying to make shapes on one of the monitors, controlling his breath, watching the screen, turning medical equipment into a game. That’s a seven-year-old telling you he’s back. We laughed. On the third day, we went home.
Wanda has been that woman every day for more than twenty-five years. I have a law degree and I teach for a living. I am reasonably good with words. They are not sufficient when it comes to her.
There are several mothers in my life. I am not confused by that. I am grateful for it. Each one of them gave me something the others couldn’t.
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. There will be flowers and a card, and if I know Wanda, she will insist neither was necessary. Ginger will spend the day underfoot, hoping the occasion calls for a longer walk than usual. Somewhere in North Carolina, Sandi will think about June 15th, except now she knows where the story ended. And I will think about my mother, who spent much of her life making difficult things feel manageable for the people around her.
The painting will still be there when we get back. A mother holding a child between two bouquets no one planned.
Sireadh Toileachas 