Camille’s Story

A Reckoning with Mother’s Day and the Month of May

It usually starts with the TV commercials.

Moms and daughters are toting brightly-colored flower bouquets, dressed in pastels and laughing at brunch. Hallmark cards, gifts and hugs abound in an effort to repay or recognize decades of unconditional love. Even though May has yet to arrive, the lurch toward Mother's Day has already begun.

But for those of us considered motherless, by choice or by circumstance, the day poses an emotional quandary. For me, it's the month itself that often proves difficult.

It's been 30 years since I last saw my mother, who died unexpectedly during the summer I was 13. My middle name, Carolyn, was her first.

Decades after losing her, I gave birth to a son in 2022, and was forced to confront the reckoning I subconsciously had with the month of May: It encompasses both Mother's Day — a holiday I had chosen to ignore as someone who had no mother or children of her own — and the anniversary of her death.

My mother’s passing has been the bookend to my summers, since she died during Memorial Day weekend in 1994 and was born the day before Labor Day in 1943. 

Now, with an adorable little boy in tow, I'm learning to embrace both motherhood and Mother's Day as I learn how to make the most of the month of May.

***

There are days you never forget and others you wish you could. The following is the latter.

The details are both murky and crystal clear, but this much is true: On May 27, 1994, my mother collapsed at work during a smoke break at UAW Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, where she did administrative work. We were told that someone found her in a bathroom on the floor. It was her own mother's 67th birthday.

We rushed to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where tubes kept her breathing and doctors informed us that she could hear us. The diagnosis: A ruptured berry aneurysm and hypertensive arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. She was only 50, but had smoked cigarettes for decades.

The next day, my father and his youngest brother told my older sister and I that she died, ironically in the same hospital where she birthed me in the spring of 1981. 

Days later, her funeral was held at the same church in Detroit where my parents — a pastor and a preacher's wife — married 30 years earlier. I had lost more than my mother. An only child of a teen-aged mother, my mother was my Battleship nemesis, a woman who typed 90 words a minute, read voraciously and crocheted her way through quiet weekends. She scribbled hangman and tic-tac-toe games on the margins of church programs to keep me occupied during long services. And she was the one who taught me American Sign Language, introduced me to classic rock and taught me how to laugh when a smile was the last thing on your mind. 

***

Earlier versions of me would have declared or assumed there was no need for bearing children, that they were lovely and adorable but expensive, and that childbirth sounded like a special kind of hell that my runner's body would happily spare. When May rolled around every year, I would ignore Mother’s Day by avoiding the brunch crowd at restaurants while checking on other friends who were motherless. We were a community, after all. Secretly, I hoped the calendar could be tethered from April to June.

Meanwhile, I served proudly as an aunt and loved my two nieces and nephew as if they were my own. 

Wouldn't that be enough?

Fast forward to 2017, when I met my husband. We married during the winter of 2018, surrounded by friends and family at a gazebo in a park in Tampa, Florida. It was one of the best days of my life.

We traveled around the world as a duo, with me sometimes declaring we were "DINKS," also known as "double income no kids." 

As my girlfriends started having children, I celebrated the news and offered support, happily attending their baby showers and rubbing their bellies.

But a few things influenced my decision to change my mind about being childless: Realizing that my husband and I would be good parents and that the thought of us growing older without offspring bothered me in a way I couldn’t explain, and the discovery of a large fibroid that made me wonder if any plans to have a child were destined to be derailed. I also talked to women decades my senior who often expressed regret at not having had children of their own.

Thankfully, the fibroid shrank and never impeded my pregnancy. So in the summer of 2022, we welcomed our chubby-cheeked, curly-haired son, whose first name is my maiden name. 

***

The month of May will forever be challenging, but I’m more open than ever to celebrating motherhood, however it looks for me. I often look at our son, who is almost 2, and realize that I knew the day I saw him first on an ultrasound image how much he would mean to me. Over time, I’m sure I’ll know what I mean to him.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.