By Matt Suddain

May, 2010

This is a short letter to you: our mums, from us: your sons.

It’s an impossible letter: impossible to find a typical mum, or an archetype to fulfil all expectations of your character. So we’d like praise your common values.

A mother and son are born at the same moment, in the same bed, or birthing pool, or broken lift. This, for you, is just the first of many painful deliveries, as you’re forced to ferry us to matches, practices, parties, and, occasionally, agonisingly, back to the hospital. As we grow and find ourselves piloting steadily more powerful bodies into increasingly reckless situations you offer whatever remote guidance you can. You are the air-traffic controllers of our lives.

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. So says the old Spanish proverb. But you are not Saints, you are women prepared to do what it takes. We don’t know the things you did, the “talks” you had with individuals who might not have had our best interests at heart, the “background checks” you performed on the people we associated with. But having you around was like having our own small branch of MOSSAD.

The infinite plasticity of motherhood. You are proof against the theory of Intelligent Design, since a grand designer would have known that your job should only be done by a creature with nine arms and turbo-powered legs; that your burden should only be carried, ironically, by a kind of Goddess: a many-handed matriarch with eyes in the back of her head. In that way you’re not so much like the mother hen as you are like the bee—a fragile but versatile creature who disobeys the laws of physics; a machine that science declares should not be capable of flight, but who says, “To hell with it, I am!

We know that you had even bigger dreams in mind for us than we. I’m sure Mrs Hillary thought her boy, Edmund, would climb the moon. I’m sure Mrs. Armstrong thought that Neill would one day plant a flag on Jupiter. “It’s a gas giant, Mum.” “Well. I’m sure you’ll find a way.” We welcome your prodigious miscalculations. You’re like a computer whose task is to overestimate our potential.

But that’s not to say you were disappointed when we didn’t reach the heights you’d imagined, or even when we plumbed the lowest depths. Your love is not dependant on our success or failure.

A mother is a differential equation comparing ambition and forgiveness.

It goes without saying that our love for you is also unconditional. If you were Eva Braun, we’d love you. If you were that giant, slathering monster squatting low over her brood of demonic spawn in the movie Aliens, we’d love you. If you were Sarah Palin, even, we’d love you, probably. But we’re glad you’re none of those.

You are the ones who raised us, the women who fought on two fronts: for our rights, and for your own. In a way it’s cruel how liberation has treated you. By saying, “Girls can do anything!” we’ve come to expect you to do everything. If you choose a career we wonder why you’ve sacrificed motherhood. If you choose motherhood we wonder if you lack ambition. And if you do both, we question whether you have a grip on your priorities. You can’t win.

“The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face,” said  D.W. Winnicott.

We’ve often wondered where you go, in those rare, quiet moments when we catch you idly contemplating a smudgy reflection in a window, or a mark on a door-frame. Sometimes we find it hard to take your care-worn face. We try to guess the lines we carved, the specific incidents. Your face is a map of our lives. We can see what we guess to be your hospital-corners, your battle-furrows.  We just want you to know that we’re very, very sorry. We’re mostly sorry about the noise. Now that we have children (or friends with children) we can say, unequivocally, that we’re really, really sorry about the noise.

And that time we were at that place, and we did that thing, and you wanted to squeeze the shitting life out of us: we’re sorry we did, and grateful you did not.

But we’re rambling. The point is, we found our own way through the minefield of family life, without the need for experts, books, Oprah, or clinically misguided Viennese psychiatrists. (Personally, we don’t ever remember having an Oedipal jealousy of Dad. We just remember being glad you kids found each other. Are our wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, a reflection of you? That isn’t really the right question. The question is: why wouldn’t we seek out the qualities of the people we love the most, and of those who love us?)

If the ones we choose to spend our lives with have your better aspects, we’re grateful; if they have your worst, we’re doomed.

There isn’t room for everything here, but key to writing a good letter, they say, is to know when not to say another thing. Somehow we think that might also be the key to being a good mother.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Thanks for everything.

Love,

Your Sons.

[Please visit me at ... http://www.suddain.com Or follow me on Twitter ... @suddain]