Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are days that I have never celebrated. Both my parents died when I was young and I have never had children. Rebecca and I are parents to two monster dogs but that really doesn’t count. Just don’t tell Arlo or Mags.

As I said my mother died when I was young. She had ALS so most of the memories I have were not particularly good memories. We don’t get to choose which moments shape us. We don’t get to decide which childhood memory stays or goes. Childhood doesn’t ask permission. That is why years later when I walk into Ingle’s this time of year and see white roses in a plastic bucket I feel ten years old again before you’ve even registered what happened.

I have grown up with an aversion to white roses

I was raised in the Methodist Church. Every May on Mother’s Day the Methodist church smelled like grief dressed up as celebration. They did it with the best intentions, I think. Someone, once, thought it was a kindness. A way to acknowledge the ones who had lost, I guess. The mothers up front received red roses. Pink for the grandmothers. And white, white for the children whose mothers were gone…..like me

You were supposed to walk to the front and take one. Everyone watched.
I learned early what it meant to be handed a white rose. It meant you were different in a way that couldn’t be hidden anymore, at least not on that particular Sunday. It meant that the woman next to you got red and you got white and the whole congregation could see the shape of your loss right there in your hand, sticking up like a flag you never asked to carry.

That’s the thing about grief learned young. It doesn’t announce itself. It hides inside ordinary things a color, a season, a month on the calendar and waits. There is a specific cruelty in rituals that mean well. They fix your grief to a calendar. They make a ceremony of your wound. They hand you a flower and call it honor when really it is just proof, proof that something is missing, proof that everyone knows, proof that you have to stand there and hold the evidence of your own sorrow while the organ plays and the mothers smile for photographs and you have to endure a Mother’s Day boring sermon from Reverend Davis.

I don’t think of my Mom too often. I do think of her every May. Not because of the commercials on the tube or the upcoming church post on Instagram about the very special Mother’s Day celebration but I think of her because somewhere in me there is still a child who knows that white means and what red means and the difference between them is everything.