Here a Mother, There a Mother, Everywhere a Bit o’Mother

Melissa Howden finds new ways of acknowledging and remembering mom.

In the days preceding Mother’s Day my girlfriend and I were particularly sensitive to all of the Mother’s Day promotions: Mother’s Day bouquets, special brunches at our favorite restaurant, and numerous grocery store displays. We took to saying to each other half jokingly, “We ain’t got no mothers!” My mother died nine years ago and my girlfriend’s mother died two years ago. So while we were both making some light of our “motherlessness” in the face of an advertising onslaught, there was no denying the presence of our mother memories.

It occurred to me that while I was saying I didn’t have a mother, I in fact did have my mother, in two containers; one in the care of a friend in California and a smaller one here with me in New Mexico. My mother knew she was dying. As such she had time to prepare, paying in advance for her own cremation and for the distribution of her ashes off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

When I went to pick up my mother’s ashes I noted her frugal practicality as she was delivered to me in a small black plastic box, within a small paper shopping bag with handles. Driving up the coast to the Bay Area from Santa Barbara in her car, I strapped her into the front seat and basically told her we were going to have to do something about her “outfit”. Shortly thereafter I purchased a beautiful Native American pot inlaid with turquoise, homage to my mother’s Southwest roots. The day I made “The Transfer” on my kitchen counter, I had a temporary breakdown worried that she might not fit in her new digs. She did, just. Next problem was that the pot did not have a top. My first solution was to use wax and seal the top with a sand dollar something I was sure she would appreciate.

Not long after, I came home on a particularly hot day and noticed the wax had melted, and the sand dollar had slid off. Living in earthquake country at the time, I knew if I didn’t do something more secure I was going to come home one day to find my mother all over the house. So I went to my neighborhood ACE hardware and purchased a cork to which I then glued the sand dollar (Gorilla Glue – great stuff!)

I know I said that my mother pre-paid for her ashes to be spread off the coast of Santa Barbara which would beg the question of why I was carrying her from place to place and purchasing a more pleasing vessel. As with all things family and death, it’s complicated. Each time my brother and I proposed to my grandmother that we make a trip to Santa Barbara to go out and spread my mother’s ashes in the Pacific, she demurred saying she was too busy. Understandably she did not want to spread the ashes of her only child. One day I took my mother over to my grandmother’s and said, “maybe she should stay with you for a while”. And there she stayed for several years until my grandmother died. My grandmother left instructions that she wanted a bit of her to be mixed with a bit of her husband (who had died some years prior) and a bit of my mother. Note: family + death = complicated. After my grandmother’s death, my mother came back to stay with me. My grandmother (and presumably her husband) is with my brother in Texas. One day my brother and I will get it together.

Meanwhile, my mother loved hollyhocks. So on Mother’s Day my girlfriend and I prepared the soil, sprinkled in some seeds with a “bit o’Mom” and created our Mother’s Memorial Hollyhock Garden.

Mothers, we’ve always got them. The relationship just takes different forms over time.