As schools start anew and I watch cheery moms across the nation sending children off to kindergarten and college, it occurs to me how good we are at faking it.
We stand tall and proud, offering our children undying support and affirmation as they grow up and out, when what we oftentimes want to do is curl into the fetal position and sob about loss.
Presenting this more positive side of our emotions is not the same as denial, by the way. The mothers I know are fully aware of their situational repression and will at some point find a private outlet for expressing these other rightful emotions. Like the closet.
I once did a series of interviews with mothers around the country and found that moms coast-to-coast had one troubling thing in common: Closet crying. Some went into the shower; others, literally, into the closet to cry.
As for the public face we give our children, I'm thinking we would all make good actresses in a different life.
I'm thinking of the time my son, then 9, had surgery to remove a benign cyst on his leg and had to be in a body cast for six weeks and how I had to hide my own sorrowful eyes while looking into his.
I'm thinking of the time my 12-year-old daughter got a wedge of glass in her foot, and the doctor said, "This is just going to pinch a little" as he was repairing her wound. I knew the words "pinch" and "a little" were about as euphemistic as words get. Still, even standing next to her head while he worked on her feet, I wasn't going to be the one to tell her.
I'm remembering my daughter in later years, who had a serious fall while jogging in Switzerland where she was studying abroad. I remember holding back feelings of abject helplessness while Skyping a concerned-but-not-too-concerned mother-face to the French-speaking l'hopital where she lay 4,000 miles away with a severe concussion.
While many of these such moments have to do with physical suffering, many more have to do with the good-byes and dismissals that riddle motherhood, beginning with vacating the womb and continuing into adulthood with any number of rejections.
This feels no more poignant than as summer ends and kids go off to the next grade and the next, milestones in human growth and development mothers are obliged to reflect back to their children as good, appropriate and essential.
My friend not only bought her first-born kindergartner a new purple L.L. Bean lunchbox and drove her to her new school, she smiled broadly as she photographed little Rebecca holding the sign she made for her: "First day of kindergarten," the sign read, "I want to be a singer, a chef and a road worker. Today, I want to be unique."
My friend watched and waved as her daughter skipped into school. And then, driving back home with her other two children, she released the other normal emotions she'd been holding back like a freight train or Meryl Streep.
"All of a sudden she was out of the car, and I realized I had to drive away. And I started to cry. But I stopped because I didn't want her brother to tell her I cried."
My sister likewise put on the, "I'm-so-happy-for-you" face as her firstborn headed to college, a six hours' drive from home. Unlike my friend with the kindergartner, who knows her daughter will more than likely live at home at least another 13 years, my sister knows Caitlin may never live at home again longer than two weeks at Christmas. Still, like a good mom, she faked it until she dropped her daughter off.
"I'm happy. I'm sad. Should I tell her I want to text?"
The best-selling memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert of "Eat, Pray, Love" fame, recently wrote on her Facebook page about the importance of claiming our true emotions.
"Nobody benefits when I try to make myself feel ways that I do not feel, and nobody benefits when I try to make myself NOT feel ways that I do feel...and nobody benefits when you do that, either. Feel what you feel, allow your emotions to be legitimate, fearlessly examine your own reactions to your own life, and live your absolute truth."
Clearly Ms. Gilbert is not a mother.
The mothers I know are indeed psychologically astute, fully aware of their emotions but just as fully aware they must never fully reveal them to their children, lest they foster co-dependence, guilt or an Oedipus complex.
Rather, they must hold back the tide until they can get on the phone with their sister.
Or duck into the closet for a meeting with their tear ducts. Hopefully, it's a big one with a blankie.
