It’s Mother’s Day and we’ve planned an outdoor brunch. The temperature is what an optimist might call, “cardigan weather”, aka “barely warm enough to be outside”, and the tablecloth on the patio table is blinding in the harsh glare of early spring. The kids are six and eight and have noticeably matured since last May when Mother’s Day was still largely a training operation directed by my husband. This year, they’ve outgrown their training wheels and are so keen to make today special that we’ve asked Mormor to join us.
Mormor is Swedish for “mother’s mother”, which is a handy Nordic system for identifying paternal and maternal grandparents. In this vein, Farfar signifies “father’s father” and Farmor is “father’s mother”. My mother’s mother died long before I was born, so I never had a Mormor to call my own. Since becoming our family’s first Mormor, my mother has drilled me with this handy bit of linguistics, along with only a few other essential Swedish phrases like, “Thank you for the Swedish meatballs” and “Wash your bum”.
My daughter has picked up on my festive vibe, bursting from her room wearing her fanciest dress, the light blue one with capped sleeves. She’s pulled her hair back in what might be her first DIY ponytail, and she’s even managed to attach a few barrettes. As she twirls to show the fullness of her skirt, her older brother scoots in front of her and does a little catwalk strut up the carpeted hallway, pointing to his button shirt, which he’s swapped out from his regular ratty Transformers hoodie. “For you, on Mama’s Day,” he announces to my leaping heart. His sister, only slightly competitive, elbows past him, “Is picking flowers for the table a good idea, Mama?” Their love contest is like a signal to quit while I’m so epically ahead before Mormor arrives with her own ideas about Mother’s Day.
I’ve ordered a bow and arrow kit for this occasion of togetherness, but we have to wait to start the game, because we know how pouty Mormor gets if we start anything fun without her. I’ve made a feast which includes, to the kids’ horror, Mormor’s favourite blue cheese soufflé. I wish my mother would just ask me for things, but instead she plays a game where she pretends to talk to herself, moaning under her breath about how oh God! What she would do for a blue cheese soufflé, just loud enough for me to hear. But Mormor is late, so her grandchildren watch without her as I open the oven to reveal the fleeting spectacle of puffed egg-white glory. I check my watch again while my son makes up a silly song about stinky cheese. Their attentiveness floods me with a high tide surge of love that backflows onto them. I wish I could bottle up this miracle of devotion, attach it to the kitchen wall with a sign that reads “break glass in case of emergency” for those regular mid-week days when the job of parenting is less marvellous.
The clock ticks another twenty minutes past the hour Mormor was supposed to arrive. The kids and I climb the shady slope behind the shed to hunt for Lily of the Valley. My son yells in triumph, the first to find a patch of fragrant, white waxed bells, sprung up through the dirt just in time for the party. I’m considering the next time-stretching activity to play when the doorbell rings. The kids spring into action, “Mormor’s here!”
Mormor is exactly an hour and a half late but it’s Mother’s Day so I shove my annoyance behind a sparkling smile. Under the feathers of a vintage fascinator, her eyes are translucent, robin egg blue. Mormor stands on the threshold and waits to be greeted by her grandchildren. “Easy!” I caution as they fly down the stairs, knowing how Mormor’s bad back and bad knees and sore feet make her unsteady. She’s not using her cane today and she’s doing all her hugging with only one arm, which activates my spidey senses. I catch sight of a bandage poking from the sleeve of her non-hugging side, and the tingle turns to alarm. I wait for the kids to run up the stairs before asking, “Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing,” she dismisses, wriggling loose from her coat and passing it to me, never mind that she’s blocking me from the coat closet. Whenever Mormor says it’s nothing, my neck tenses up in preparation for something. She kisses me on both cheeks, and changes the subject by calling up the stairs, “It smells wonderful in here! Lilla Mama has been cooking something delicious!” And she’s almost right, because the food sure did smell wonderful an hour ago when brunch was supposed to start. Now, the soup is thick-skinned and the casserole is cold and the soufflé is a sad flat pancake. Her arrival makes me feel a little deflated too, like I’ve been warming in the oven way too long. The kids yell from outside, “Mama, let’s shoot the target!”
I help settle Mormor on her cushion at the patio table out back, wrap a woollen shawl over her shoulders, and fill her teacup before she can complain about the chill. The kids are jumping up and down around the box of bows and arrows which sits unopened on the lawn. “Come on, Mama!” Whenever the children call, Mama, Mormor responds as if they are addressing her instead of me. She thinks it’s a little joke, calling them her children. I don’t think they notice, but I do.
Mormor is chatting with my husband at full-volume and at top-speed. She’s gesticulating madly as if to make sure I notice the elasticized tensor bandage that’s roughly knotted around her left hand. Mormor’s longstanding motto is, “dare to be different”, and since it’s more like double cardigan weather out here, and I lean into the fat chance that maybe she’s fashioned this weird tensor bandage as a sort of rebellious, hobo-chic glove instead of an actual injury. Now that she’s safely locked in conversation and all tucked in, the perfect moment has presented to step out from the pull of her vortex and join my kids on the lawn. But it’s Mother’s Day and this is my mother and sure, she’s damn late but also only just arrived, so instead of picking up the bow to be my very best mother self, I catch Mormor’s arm mid-swing so I can be the best daughter instead.
She wasn’t going to mention it but now that I’ve insisted, there’s an epic saga about tripping over the vacuum cleaner at 3am two nights before. It was so dark, she says, actively dissecting how she fell and skidded along the carpet, how she thought at first that she must have broken a bone, how the carpet burned the back of her hand and all about the pain of it and how there was enough blood to soak into the carpet, enough to smear all over the baseboards. I was so alone and bewildered, she leans in and whispers, gesturing for more tea with those clear eyes that jig pleadingly up then cast down like fishing lures, sharp pupils catching at me again like pointed hooks.
My husband has escaped to snack on a bowl of nuts from a reclined position while reading the newspaper in the safety of the living room. The bullseyes in the yard dried about eighty-nine hours ago but I ask my son to do another thorough check. “Yes sir, Mama!” My daughter has never had to wait this long for anything and is almost at her limit, shivering and fighting tears. I wrap her in my scarf and ask her to find a special yellow flower for the table that is by now as laden as a Renaissance still life. My patience might be running on blue cheese fumes but the endearing efforts of the kids keeps me afloat.
“Alskling, don’t worry about me,” says Mormor, which always makes me cringe. I wash my hands at the kitchen sink and attend to company morale. I whisper Top Secret Intel to my daughter, confiding where the forbidden chips are hidden in the pantry. I designate my son Official Commander of the Apple Juice. In a different voice, I ask my husband to come back outside and set up the game, with instructions on where to set the targets in the bushes at the back of the lawn. I dry my hands and give away the perfectly-packaged, making-memories moment and for evermore, my husband will be the one remembered as the super fun dad who shot the arrows.
The World’s Worst Bandage has grafted itself into the back of Mormor’s hand, hard-crusted with old blood and plasma, brown and yellow. I exhale slowly as my patience, another priceless, precious elixir that can’t be bottled, is siphoned from my reserves by an unallocated source. Oh, Mormor. I sometimes wish for a little less less.
Fifteen years earlier, shortly after she left my dad and moved into her own place, there was a big fire in Mormor’s apartment. I was burning candles, she said, had forgotten to blow them out before she went to sleep, and somehow the curtains ignited. She slept right through the smoke and the heat, the alarms and the sprinklers, until firefighters axed down her door and pulled her out of bed. It was an accident, she said, but I struggled to understand, staying part-furious that it was a terrible, reckless call for attention, part-terrified that she had planned something more morbid. I unknot the terrible elastic and resist scolding her, as unsure about how she came about this injury as the last. “Mom. Everything will be alright.” These are the same words I used after the fire, the same words I say to my kids when they are hurt or scared. The words are an unconditional, soothing balm that mothers should say, something that I still wish she would ever say to me.
Sometimes, when Mormor comes over, I lose track of my place in the archetype as a mother. Maybe losing her own mother before she had children of her own messed up my mother’s natural sense of generational unfolding, keeping her stuck on a sort of adolescent level while the cycle carries on around her. She gives me an extra set of duties, making me a hybrid, a double-reverse mother-child who is both her respectful daughter who is also in charge of providing her with mental health support, keeping her gutters clean, and banking advice, all with uncritical, nurturing attention. My dutiful guilt and my lack of Swedish swirls with this unnatural hierarchy where I’m free to name myself something powerful and dystopian like, Mordor, Mother-Daughter.
She never shared much about her childhood, mostly that her brother was the brains who got all the education, and that her sister was the beauty who got all the attention. All I know is that Mormor was the middle one, with a less distinct role, and whatever she got seems to have left her needing more more more. When I consider the unwanted roles she gives me to play, it scares me to think I might be the best mother she’s ever had.
I channel Dr McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy and order Mormor to keep her bandage submerged. Mormor always says I can do anything, that I am such a talented marvel. I might just as well be Patrick Dempsey, a television actor pretending to be an expert in surgical care. Like the actor, I don’t have an actual medical degree or experience in a burn ward. But Mormor knows that I will do it. Not because she’s seen my stocked first aid kit, which is just barely adequate for this task. And not because it’s Mother’s Day either. If she knows two things about me it’s how she can rely on my can-do, fake-it-til-I-make-it, problem-solving response to her various upsets, and how dutifully I leave myself and my own family to answer her call. Mormor brings me her hurts like a cat who brings mice to the foot of the bed. Her hurts are about her past, things that wounded her much more than any fire, bruise or flesh wound, from a time when I didn’t yet exist. Acting like Dr McDreamy is one thing. But I have no interest in pretending I’m Dr Phil.
My friends tell me I need to set boundaries. But how can I draw lines when my siblings live too far away to drive her to the doctor or tuck her in when she’s sick or make sure there’s blue cheese and pickled herring in her fridge? They don’t carry the same ever-present, low-grade worry that runs like a leaky tap through my subconscious. No matter how much they care and want to help, they can’t truly see, in their weekly phone calls, her day-to-day struggles, that only someone who lives five minutes from her can see. They’ll never know how much of her hurt she brings me to fix.
My friends tell me I’m a good daughter and I wish I could believe them. I’ve been a mother for eight years, and so far, my mother always finds a way to make Mother’s Day about her. I never feel like what I do is ever enough. Having to set boundaries with my mother on Mother’s Day feels so awful, until I remember the old joke that every day is Mother’s Day.
By the time I’ve coaxed off the tensor, the kids have long lost all the arrows. The work is intense and ugly, and when it’s finally done, the entire back of Mormor’s hand is a shocking pink square, more delicate than newborn baby skin.
Between the laws of chemistry and physics, the six-egg soufflé has shrunk to a single-serve puck. Mormor, freshly discharged, wolfs it back in three bites. “Su-perb!” She exclaims, which is for sure a su-perb lie, but if a hit of cold, shrivelled Roquefort is the kiss that makes things better, so be it. And just like that, she’s back to telling stories while the kids devour their re-heated mac and cheese, play-fighting for room on my lap.
Mormor pulls a few sprigs of Lily of the Valley from a vase and crushes them onto her neck and into her wrists. She squints her wrinkly face into a devilish grin and dangles the wreck of flowers at the kids. “These are poisonous,” she rasps in her best scary witch voice, which makes them shriek. “But good for smelling like an old lady!” which makes us all laugh. We raise our glasses and make toasts to learning new things, to staying healthy, and to mothers present and passed. And to the complexities of late comers to the party that show us, and shape us, and make us who we are.
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