A lanyard for Mama on Mother’s Day
I made two memorable gifts for Mama in my childhood. One was an Ivory dish detergent bottle with the top cut off, made into a vase, and colored with markers to look like stained glass (do you remember it, Mama? Is it in my annex in the attic along with every book report I ever wrote and the tiny sequined dance recital costumes?). The other was a papier mache bowl, with yarn creating a design on its surface, all painted red, the yarn turning a cumbersome brown in the process.
Mothering is a tough job–not only for all the enthusiasm that must be mustered for brown-yarned-papier-mache bowls, but for all the other stuff. This Mother’s Day, make Mama something to say thank you for all those sleepless nights when she has worried that your car has driven off the side of Old Fort Mountain in the fog and is buried beneath poison ivy vines so no one can see you or hear your screams for help coming from the ravine as you slowly dehydrate and become unable to move, rendering the poison ivy you’ve caught unbearably itchy until you lose your mind and when they finally do find you, you have to be put into Broughton Mental Hospital and Mama visits every day, bringing pimento cheese sandwiches and brownstone front cake, and reminding you to write thank you notes to those nice orderlies.
And, of course, who better to serenade mothers everywhere this day than, well, Billy Collins, in a poem that gets to the heart of it:
The Lanyard
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
– Billy Collins
As if a lanyard would do it. But ah, for the surety we had as children that our handmade gifts are enough. Let’s bring that feeling back, eschewing expensive cards and jewelry for something made by our own hand. A card, a cake, a homemade macaroni and cheese with wheat germ and rolled oat topping baked with garlic.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mama. The mac and cheese is coming soon.
And to Emma and Tess, the two who make me a Mama, my love and everything else.
