Liz Smith Shares a Chapter from The Mother Book

Here is an excerpt from Liz Smith’s The Mother Book: A Compendium of Trivia and Grandeur Concerning Mothers, Motherhood and Maternity.’

Mother’s Day has long been in the top ten, third from the top, as the year’s Sunday services go.
—Minister’s wife

I was raised a Southern Baptist Sunday School and “stay for church” goer. So Mother’s Day was of some minor moment in our house, for it broke the monotony of five Sundays a year with a little tremolo of “specialness” always so welcome to children. There was invariably a sermon on the subject of mother.

Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, was a big favorite, as was Sarah, who had conceived at age ninety. Generally, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was handled gingerly by the fundamentalists who considered her mostly a preserve of the Catholics and thereby dangerous. A really perceptive preacher might slip in some healthy parent-child separation psychology by telling us again the important story of Jesus disappearing into the temple at age twelve to talk to the elders and how he scolded his mother when she found him, by saying: “Know ye not, I must be about my Father’s business?”

The sermon was the least of it. We were usually preoccupied with pinning on and wearing our red carnations to symbolize devotion to a mother who was still alive, noting with a thrill of fear the people who wore white flowers because their mothers were dead. My brothers and I secretly wondered and whispered about how it would feel—sometime … some horrible day, to be pinning on the white carnation? And there was always someone in our family pew wearing a white flower, for our grandparents had no living parents that we could remember.

The ritual of the flowers was a small thing; it only served to give continuity to our lives and to remind us for one day to be nicer, sweeter, more thoughtful of mother who could always shame us to tears anytime we slipped and “acted ugly.”

Mother’s Day has turned into something of a joke for the sophisticated. It is a day that brings out gritty editorials and comments on "commercialism.” Even the traditionalists don’t want to make too much of giving Mother her “day” when the times have changed so much that it seems like merely a sop and everybody knows Mother is either due 365 days as a fully recognized person, or let’s just forget the whole thing, due to overemphasis.

But like millions of others, I still remark Mother’s Day. I do send the “cute” cards and sometimes a plant or box of candy or a special note. I suppose it is all in the spirit with which one celebrates any occasion; like Christmas, either a glory or a horror. I must admit the material in this chapter is surprising. My researcher and I approached Mother’s Day as a subject rather as if we were about to bridle a nasty horse, sidling up to it reluctantly. But it turned out to be fascinating and—nothing we expected.

Mother’s Day is not for total ignoring, yet. The writer Martha Weinman Lear and I once worked together as production assistants for NBC. We were “immortalized,” I as “The Brain” and Martha as “The Body,” in a novel by Stanley Flink called Will They Get It in Des Moines? As years went by, Martha proved that she was not only “The Body,” but “The Brain” as well.

On Mother’s Day, 1975, she wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine. Response to her meditations about her ambivalent relationship with her mother elicited more mail than anything else she ever wrote. Martha received letters for months and is still introduced as “the one who wrote that Mother’s Day piece.”