For Mother's Day

We are on our way back from a weekend in Leesburg, babysitting my mostly new nephew and celebrating Mother’s Day, when we stop at a drive-thru Starbucks outside of Culpepper. A drive-thru Starbucks. I get a Mocha Light Frappaccino (no whip cream) and he gets an iced Mocha. We talk about how family dynamics never really change and how when you are younger, you make the assumption that things will get better the older you get. That at some point, your family will realize you are an adult and that you exist without them. But this never really happens.

My mom and dad admit that my sister is the only one of the three of us that was planned. My brother and I were surprises, as they liked to call us, because when my parents first eloped in Korea they didn’t want to have kids. Four years later my brother was born, and there are only baby pictures to prove it. There exists only one picture of my mom while pregnant, and she’s hiding her round belly under a large overcoat. You can’t even tell she’s really pregnant unless you look really closely.

Last night was prom night outside of Culpepper, Virginia. I know this because the drive-thru barista at Starbucks sleepily tells us this as he hands us our drinks. He apologizes for not being ridiculously customer-friendly, blaming it on prom. I drive away and turn to my boyfriend: we should’ve asked if he lost his virginity. A little down the road we pass a truck and he points out a bumper sticker that says: Pro No Sex with Pro-Lifers. We both agree that that’s a good plan.

Mother’s Day is the biggest holiday of the year for flowers and cards. It’s marketed for weeks, months even, before the day arrives. For Mother’s Day, give an engraved iPod. I think I’ll give an engraved card. One year, I remember getting up really early to make my mom pancakes. The smell filled the entire house, and hoping to get her while she was still in bed, by the time I got them upstairs she was already out of the shower and drying her hair in the bathroom. She yelled from beneath the hairdryer: you know I don’t really eat breakfast, but thank you. I put the pancakes on the ironing board and left to get ready for church.

Once I made a mini-scrapbook out of a magazine about mothers and daughters with Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner on the cover. I pasted pictures of my mom and me, and then wrote notes about how much I appreciated having her as a mom. She told me that she told her best friend that it was one of the nicest Mother’s Day gifts she’d ever gotten.

I’ve only ever really seen my mom get angry twice. Once, I was directly responsible for that anger, when I accidentally backed my dad’s car into a tree in our driveway while learning how to drive stick shift. Do you know how much this is going to cost? I can’t believe you let this happen! The other I was only present for through the ceilings, when I could hear my mom yelling at my dad in the attic. She was crying, and her voice shook and creaked. My mom emerged from the attic, a shoebox in hand. The air conditioning installers had thrown a nativity scene I had made inside a shoebox while in preschool, across the attic thinking it was just a box. She had managed to find all the pieces except for the baby Jesus. The Virgin Mary was decapitated, and nothing seemed to fit inside that shoebox anymore. Now you know what those things mean to me, she said.