A Red Carnation for the Children I Did Not Have (5-9-21 / edited 6-10-26)

12 or 13 years ago, I stopped at a Safeway on a Sunday afternoon in May. A few yards inside the sliding-door entrance, a young employee stood. Her arm cradled a dozen long-stemmed carnations -- red, pink and white, curly and lush.

She smiled and extended a red carnation toward me.

How nice! I reached out to take the flower.

As I almost touched it, she asked, “Are you a Mom?”

My hand froze and I shook my head.

She withdrew the flower. The girl looked away, hopeful, out toward the parking lot.

I thought, “Man, that’s cold, Safeway.” I veered toward the produce, for the few pears and spinach I'd come for, plus roasted and salted almonds.

At least train your worker to ask first, then offer the flower. Even better, if you’re giving away flowers today, give them freely. Are you familiar with the life that any woman – or man – might bring in behind them, through your automatic doors? The potential unkindness of retracting a kind one-on-one gesture?

What if I’d been a woman trying to get pregnant, unsuccessfully? Or had easily gotten pregnant but then endured a series of miscarriages? Or whose in vitro didn’t take, again? Or whose heart and spirit had been whiplashed by failed adoptions? Then by failed foreign adoptions? Here’s-a-flower-Oh-WAIT-NO-you-have-failed-today’s-test.

Your ‘offer’ that day surely extended to some who shook their heads like I did, with giant hearts hollowed by grief.

As a person who did not feel certain about wanting to raise a human child myself, I had the luxury of feeling dissed, annoyed. But for my friends who did feel that certainty and couldn’t be parents, for various reasons? They, most of all, deserved a curly flower from your chilled case, on Mother’s Day.

Also deserving, anyone with a complicated, painful experience of being mothered, or anyone altogether motherless, or whose mother died when they were young, or whose mother had lived for decades but died only days before they walked through those sliding-glass doors, maybe after the funeral.

The pears all looked sub-par. Like they’d never be edible. I couldn’t focus.

Couldn’t imagine a store doing that, with any other sub-set of their customer base (people who buy food).

Hold out a flower. Then. “Are you a … surfer? A practicing Buddhist? An architect? At least 1/256th Cherokee? No, only 1/512th?” Say sorry, and take it back. Next!

I doubted they would think of doing that, with any other sector of society. And many ‘non-moms’ and ‘non-dads’ feel very deeply about their animal companions; they are no less their family. Some are like mothers to other humans who need nurturing, whatever their ages, in the thousand ways any human needs nurturing, from beyond that of one named Mother.

Yet many people would think, Oh. What a nice gesture, giving moms a carnation, Safeway. And some still think, underneath that nice-gesture: Well, if a woman doesn’t have children, there’s got to be something wrong with her. Motherhood still holds a default status for ‘normal’ female adults. You know this much is true, if you are a female adult and somehow not a mother.

The sadness, the pity, in some people’s eyes, when they hear my answer to the usual ice-breaker, “So you have kids?”. I’m not sad about it. I was unsure about it, and it didn’t happen, and now that ship has sailed, biologically. The why of that, and the what-now of that, I’m still figuring out. But pity me not.

Plenty of moms and dads will say, "You can't imagine what having a child feels like." All I can guess is that they were younger siblings, or only siblings, who can't imagine what older siblings of many siblings, can imagine. The older of many siblings did watch, did hold, the most vulnerable, tiny people (usually issued from the same woman), tiny people who entered their households, helpless, precious, perfect however they arrived. We olders did hold bottles up to their greedy, sucking mouths, then wash those bottles with wire brushes, standing on stools at kitchen sinks. We did change diapers, and clean up projectile matter, from one end or another. Did teach the children well, how to tie their shoelaces, recognize the sound of a cow or a rooster, protect their balance when they first tottered across a living-room or dandelion-puffed lawn, Franken-baby style.

Many of us did much the same for neighborhood children, issued from beloved neighbor women -- the diapers, the sound of cows, the building of forts and reading of favorite books. (At age 13, I took little Kathy R. to kindergarten orientation, to meet her first schoolteacher, since her mother could not be home to do that. Kathy R. is now an oncologist at Duke. My eyes fill, to think about her kindergarten start, on this day for mothers.)

Some of us felt much the same toward younger people as we grew up, younger people who needed a Teacher Aide to help them go to the bathroom, and who tried to respect their dignity, if, at age 9 or 10, they had Duchenne's muscular dystrophy and needed someone to wipe their bottoms in a 'handicapped' bathroom.

Some of the moms and dads who are certain that the childless can't imagine, they will not have a clue how to interact, or understand, those who are not formal parents of human animals.

When my (now-ex) Bob and I were first dating, one of his law partners hosted a meet-and-greet for a candidate for county council (the county next door). We couldn’t vote for the man, but in support of this friend, we showed up to help him ‘fill the house.’

The candidate shook our hands, asked our names, gave a short paragraph about all that “our families, our children’s schools” deserved, “right?” Bob and I looked at each other. “Sure. Even if we don’t have children.” (We were happy to pay taxes to educate the children of our own localities, which helped everyone. This seemed a no-brainer for us.)

But. As if we’d said, “Sure. Even if we’re serial killers,” the man took a step back and put his hands in his pockets. Yet he started over with his same spiel about our families, our children’s schools, caught himself. He retracted the flower. He tried again, 'our kids'. He did not know how to interact with us.

(Also. This candidate-man was warm and engaging. He won the primary, and went on to become county executive for a couple of terms. He will probably seek higher office. His own kids are likely in their 30s or 40s now. Maybe they will question the obligation to have, necessarily, children. Maybe he’ll be more comfortable with the unchilded citizenry.)

That same night I got a call from my sister Pauline. “You’re gonna be an Aunt Mary again!” -- 6th time (with another yet to come).

Thinking of untouchable carnations, I veer toward the ones in Sargeant’s lovely painting in the Tate Gallery, “Carnation, Carnation, Lily, Rose.” How emotional I felt to visit the work again in a different century/millennium, with the gallery itself split into two, across a newer, old London. Like seeing old friends, those little girls and those flowers.

Also remembering how that thirsty flower became the cause for greedy Ugolin and his grandfather to plot against their neighbor, Jean de Florette.*

But I digress.

It’s Mother’s Day. And my heart inflated to call and speak to my mom this morning, just to hear her voice, in real time. And finally, after a number of near-hugs interrupted by illness and bad weather, to know I’ll see her in person and hug her, next weekend. My mother, a National Merit Scholar in high-school, was told by her father, “girls don’t go to college, they take care of their husbands and children.” So she didn’t, and did the other.

My friend Marian, now in her 70s, became pregnant with twins at age 35 and was called a “geriatric maternal patient.” They used that word at every visit, she said, "geriatric." As if, birthing-wise, it ain't over 'til it's over? As if most species don't reproduce as long as they live (which most species do)? I have friends who didn’t try to have children until close to age 40, even after. And Marian seems hardly geriatric now, with her vibrant spirit and intellect.

Choices progress and bloom for younger women, by the year. The assumption, the cultural norm, of producing children as a given? Younger couples I know speak of being intentionally “child-free” instead of “childless,” like I was described at their age. I don’t think my nieces feel that same expectation to bear a next generation, any more than they would have to fight to go to college. Any more than my nephews do, who have a different fathering timeline altogether.

Their job expectations (if not their parity against a man’s pay, sigh) are much broader. Women have worked on the International Space Station. They fly airplanes, perform neurosurgery, fight fires, create groundbreaking software. They’re master carpenters, Oscar-winning film directors and screenwriters, economists, high-court judges. These jobs would have been unreachable for my mother. And, except for a few pioneers, unsupported dreams for me and my childhood girlfriends.

In the late-‘60s a game called “What Will I Be?” had very few choices for girls. Ballerina (!) nurse, airline stewardess, model. (So likely for each one of us.) If you picked the ‘personality card’ stating “YOU ARE OVERWEIGHT,” your choices would shrink even further. (Literally, that was part of the game.) You wouldn't even wonder why 'overweight' was in the 'personality' card deck.

By the mid-‘70s, at least, the game included an astronaut and filmmaker and news reporter. Women were only legally allowed to hold their own credit as of 1974, the year I started paying into Social Security. For a peer group only 5-10 years younger than any one of us, opportunities can change dramatically. Even if they're a long haul, in new cultural frameworks and deeper values and beliefs.

A perfume commercial in the late ‘70s featured a woman who could “bring home the bacon” from work, then “fry it up in a pan,” but never let her man forget he was a man. No pressure, all those expected and simultaneous jobs. Maybe no sleep, either.

Even the liberated and not-overweight news reporter and the perfumed bacon-bringer would have had children, though. If not, they would still be thought to have something “wrong” with them.

That Safeway turned into a Badlands several years ago– an interactive children’s play space. Kind of perfect and hilarious for any nulliparous woman and our invisible carnations. Very recently, the play space closed down altogether. The building is barren.

The other evening in the woods, my park-ranger friend Troy rolled up and said in one breath, “Happy Mother’s Day I’m saying it to everybody and especially you because you’re like a mother to so many people even if no one says it you are and everyone should celebrate something so basic no matter they’re appreciated for it so I’m saying it to you 'cause I appreciate you, Miss Mary.”

Troy knows I do not have children. He’s also extremely adept at speaking without punctuation.

Happy Mother’s Day, Troy. He deserves to hear that, too. Troy deserves a flower just for his fast-moving, generous brain. He was parenting me, right then and there. And I am just one of many for him in the woods, along with his wife, kids and grandchildren at home.

So Happy Mother’s Day, and a long-stemmed curly carnation to all of you, however you mother and whatever your gender. However you care about people and other living things, to listen, and wonder how you can be yourself and help someone be and become themselves, to learn and love, and love learning, and loving, and doing something for other living things, out of love and what you've learned so far.

Like my cool aunts who didn’t have children. Like the Auntie M I try to be. Like the educator, advisor, group leader I've found myself, in various incarnations. Like any mother. And a big, curly, fragrant flower to the planet we share. The planet who is mother for all of us mothers.

Yours always,

Muffin, none the wiser

* soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr7UFcMGA3Q