My friend, Susanne The Scot is out of town and I am taking care of her Guniea Pig. It isn’t much of a task. I drop by once a day, top off the water bottle, refill her straw ball, clean the poop out of her cage and refresh her dinner dish. I also chat her up, though mostly she stays in her cardboard box and eyes me suspiciously. This is the second time I have been entrusted with the care of The Guniea in Susanne and Steve’s absence, and to be honest, I like it. Such a small thing. Silly, no?
Still, in my attempt to become a better kind of friend, I thought I’d leave a little Welcome Home / Happy Easter gift to surprise them upon their return, so I picked up a little straw basket for a buck-fifty, some green plastic grass for seventy-nine cents, the traditional yellow chickadee Peeps (c) and a variety of foil-wrapped chocolates. I was feelin’ good as I carried my purchases out to the car.
And then…it struck me how every Easter of my children’s childhood, I had somehow relied upon my mother for providing an appropriate Easter experience. Maybe I should explain here that an “appropriate Easter experience” in my childhood had much less to do with chocolates and bunnies than it did with starched dresses and stiff leather shoes. There were always a couple of candies made available after breakfast and before Sunday School, but Easter egg hunts and gift baskets weren’t our tradition. Not that we didn’t want them. Not that my children didn’t want them…they just weren’t how we celebrated. A lamb-shaped cake maybe. A nice ham. A Cadbury cream egg or two. But mostly, it was about The Christ and The Cross and The Palm Fronds and such.
And so, as I’m sitting there in my car this afternoon, with the makings of a proper little Easter basket in the plastic bag in the passenger seat, I find myself suddenly in tears over all the Easters that I didn’t go overboard on with pastel-coloured egg hunts and bunny suits, all the Easter Bunny polaroids I didn’t drag my babies to the mall for. All the little suits and dresses and leather shoes they didn’t strut crosstown in. All the holidays I blew off or didn’t fully celebrate or were simply underwhelming because Mommie was too consumed with her own shit to take the time and energy to make them as joyous as they should have been.
I look at the damn basket and fucking plastic grass in the bag beside me and all I can think of are the baskets and grasses and foil-covered chocolates that I did not surprise Mouse and Ashlie with and I hate myself deeply and furiously in that moment. So much I did not give them. So much I considered unimportant at the time. So much I can never make up for.
I collect myself after a while, and I come home, bringing the bags inside and shoving them into a corner for the night; half intending to put together the little basket and present it to Mouse in the morning. Half convinced that doing so would be a sad, awkward attempt long after such things ceased to matter.
It is easier to try a being a better friend than it is to try being a better mother. Especially when you have recently failed hugely and publicly and with a certain finality at the latter. At which point, the things you do TO and FOR your remaining child are all processed through the lens of loss. They seem overwrought because they ARE overwrought. They seem desperate because YOU are desperate. There is nothing else, nothing more you COULD be.
And so I sit tonight, with my cream eggs and bunny ears; not knowing if I should present them tomorrow morning to my grown son on his way to work or my Scottish friend’s guniea pig who refuses to let me nuzzle her but takes my offering of fresh spinach without recrimination. The truth is, of course, that the only person would still appreciate such things is no longer with us to give a shit about any of it and there is not a damn thing I can do about that.