What Steve Braunias will think about on Mother’s Day

'I wish I had one to look at tomorrow on Mother’s Day.'

It’s always the mother and the mother’s fault in the modern memoir, in Grand by Noelle McCarthy and The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw - the mother, variously, as treacherous and destructive, villainous and careless. But really both books are love stories. They come in peace. They ask for a reckoning. They would make interesting gifts - perhaps wrapped in sheets of rage, maybe not so much placed gently on a table as thrown like a brick through the window - for Mother’s Day.

My mum collected very delicate seashells with a pale orange or yellow colour from the beach at Mt Maunganui. She was very good at it, had an amazing eye. I joined her one time and I couldn’t find a single coloured shell; she kept saying, “There’s one … Here’s another one … This is a nice one.” She would put them in frames, and hang them on the walls of her unit. I wish I had one to look at tomorrow on Mother’s Day.

What was the coronation but a last bequest to a little-loved son by a little-loving mother? We have lived our lives in the knowledge that Charles was a poor inconsequential sap - until he was liberated, finally, by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The lip-readers claimed he said that when he was stuck in the royal coach outside the royal gates in the royal traffic jam, “This is boring.” But it was a passing frustration. Otherwise it was remarkable how happy he looked. He looked like he was glowing. He looked, finally, like a man of consequence - a man freed from the obligations of Mother’s Day.

My mum was a very good gardener. I remember the great clumps of red and white impatiens out the front of her unit; on visits home, I’d catch the bus to the Mount, walk over to visit my brother at his house, and then walk over to the unit, and I’d always look forward to seeing those flowers, their burst of colour, their happiness. I took a cutting after she died and grew it for a few years in various flats. I wish I still had one of her plants to look at tomorrow on Mother’s Day.

Medea was a devoted wife and mother in the town of Corinth until her husband Jason was unfaithful. In her book The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster, and Muse, Jana Rivers Norton writes, “Medea unleashes unspeakable horror upon human flesh rather than move forward in life.” Yes, that’s one way of describing the fact she killed their two sons. Medea reasoned that without their father’s protection they would have been killed anyway. In the classic Euripides play, she says, “I must not, by lingering, deliver my children for murder to a less kindly hand. They must die at all events, and since they must, I who gave them birth shall kill them.” She did it out of love; even Medea deserves a card for Mother’s Day.

My mum was very afraid in the last months or even couple of years of her life. I would receive phone calls. There was someone in the unit; they’d hide behind the washing machine, or the couch; they were always lurking, always after dark – she had an idea that it was a bus driver. There’s someone there, she’d say. No there’s not, I’d tell her. Sometimes I got angry about it. No there’s f***ing not, I’d tell her. I wish I’d been a better son and I’ll probably think about that tomorrow on Mother’s Day.

The 1976 book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, by the great American poet Adrienne Rich, is considered a classic. She writes, “When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority … Motherhood calls to mind the home, and we like to believe that the home is a private place.” But there is no more powerful symbol of authority than the home. I like to think of all the private places all over New Zealand – the houses, the apartments, the units, the caravans, anywhere you call a home – making some nice gesture, having some nice thought, tomorrow in honour of Mother’s Day.