📅 hallmark holidays 📅

and the books we're writing

a piece of mine (still!) in progress, mt. rainier

greetings, greetings to you, dear reader.

as with springtime, i often feel that this time of year is also a season of hallmark holidays. mother’s day is in a few weeks. i’m watching as the onslaught dramatically increases in my email inboxes. this weeks’s subject lines are:

🎣 mother’s day is coming up

🎣 mother’s day is almost here

🎣 for the wine mom, the step-mom, the supermom & more...

🎣 gifts for mom

🎣 5 can’t-miss deals to make mom’s day

🎣 save 25% this mother’s day

i was reminded during a phone call with a friend yesterday that this is my second year not celebrating mother’s day. it will be my ninth year not celebrating father’s day. last year’s mother’s day felt easy compared to the first time i didn’t celebrate father’s day. last year, i could treat the holiday as just another day. nine years ago, i was somewhere in a small town on the rhein river in germany, the summer after finishing my sophomore year of high school. i spent the day wandering around in a solemn silence with a friend who knew some of the details of my parents separating. walking back to the hotel to cry and nap before dinner. trying to piece together some form of thought about the grief and the mystery in the day.

not to exclude the emotional weight that those days hold for me, but let’s talk about capitalism for a second! a critique of these holidays is summed up by the phrase “hallmark holidays” — in that the day revolves around predominantly commercial purposes, rather than historical contexts. and that the hallmark company, in particular, benefits from these holidays, as their greeting card sales are buoyed by the celebration of these days.

this isn’t to say, dear reader, that i don’t want to hear about how much you love the mothers in your life. that you’re planning the biggest fucking celebration of your mother. i’d be happy to hold the balloons and serve the cake slices and cheers the glasses of champagne. i just won’t be hosting those parties. (except for myself as a dog mom).

nor is this to say, dear reader, that i’m going into a deep analysis of motherhood. even though i’m sure at some point i will. my writing to you today has more to do with the consciousness with which we think about how we celebrate those in our lives. and what happens when a void enters.

of all of the emails i received about mother’s day in the past three weeks, there’s one that stands out: from canva.

the text reads: “mother’s day is coming up and we know it can be a difficult day for some. that’s why we’re giving you the option to opt-out of mother’s day emails from us.”

it’s the only email of this kind that i’ve received this year.

i appreciate the opportunity to opt-out. it’s not that this will make a significant dent in the emails that i receive, but knowing that there’s one less i can count on coming into my inbox feels like a brief respite.

compounded by the frequency of reminders about the impending holiday, i can’t help but remember that this is, also, the first mother’s day without my grandmother here. i’ve found myself thinking of her frequently the past few weeks. listening to the few voicemails she left on my phone before her passing. two of note are from when i was in mt. rainier national park last august. i used to speak to her every day on the phone, but due to the nature of where i was in this park, i didn’t have any cell service. she still called and left voicemails. and then sent emails (thinking not having cell service meant that i could still get emails).

i guess you know that this is grandma and i’m just calling to say hi and i hope that everything is going smoothly for you and dot is enjoying the sights of the united states and that’s all i have to say right now, i hope all’s good, like i just said, so know often that i’m thinking of you, talk to you sometime, take care, love loves.

this is grandma, just calling to see if you’re doing okay, better than okay, i hope to speak to you sometime soon, like maybe tomorrow or the next day, anyway, just thinking of you and sending my love to you two, bye, be careful

she was my first call out of the park. to have a record of her voice feels like she’s still here, that i can still talk to her, that even though i won’t be able to call this mother’s day and talk to her on the phone, she knows that i’m thinking of her. her run-on sentence of voicemails feels like i could string her voice together.

i love big, dumb, stupid love. love that exists outside of reason. love that is extraordinarily simple. extraordinarily complex. that is woven in and through time. that has a life of its own. that finds its feet as it walks. that can be found in the nothing and the everything. love that is small, smart, and intelligent. i love all the love. and it’s fair to say that i felt all of these ways about my grandmother. i feel these ways about the people in my life who i love.

and a particular example of this is that before we knew how to talk to one another, my grandmother and i would talk about books. what books we liked reading, what books we didn’t like reading, what books changed our minds about something.

my grandmother and i lived on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and during my rebellious phase, in which i made it my goal to terrify my conservative grandparents on both sides of the family, i send my grandmother a copy of mohsin hamid’s the reluctant fundamentalist.¹ we had read the book in my global literature class in high school, alongside wole soyinka and jamaica kincaid, and it remains one of my favorite books. it was a book that completely changed the way i thought about the world, where the idea of colonialism and american imperialism were juxtaposed in stark contrast with their effects and impacts on the lives of individuals and communities. i was hopeful that my grandmother would have a similar ah-ha moment. instead, i got a call with a loud proclamation of ‘i can’t believe they’re letting you read this in school!’

in the months before my grandmother’s death, she and i met each other for the first time as adults. she heard my stories, and i heard hers. she became the person with whom i spoke the most — we talked for hours about everything and nothing.

when visiting her last summer, i remember her talking about the experience of reading matt haig’s the midnight library. i had read the book in the previous year and admired the storyline about the choices we make in a lifetime, and how they impact the future and those around us without us really knowing. it was in line with a lot of the spiritual questions i was asking myself about life and its meaning. about what it means to live a meaningful and authentic life.

my grandmother asked me what i had thought of the book, and i told her as such. i paused, then asked her for her thoughts.

i remember her getting really quiet for a moment. she responded that she wasn’t sure what to think of the book, because she started to wonder if she had made the right choices in her life, getting her to the moment in time in which we were having the conversation. she had endured a great deal of hardship in her life: her husband passing away from cancer, her daughter passing away from a heart failure induced by alcoholism, her father passing away in her 30s.

i asked her at some point in our many phone calls before this visit to tell me about her life. to give me the higlights and the lowlights. to share what it was like to be a person in the world, in her world. and all she was able to say was that she doesn’t remember anything after her dad died, because it was too painful to look at life.

i think a lot about these conversations with her, as i wade through the muck and the mire that is my own life. i wonder what choices will inform the future in ways that i can’t even begin to predict. i wonder what books in my library will be useful to read. i wonder if, by the end of it all, i’ll have regrets about the choices i made, the people i loved, the ways i lived. it’s my hope that i don’t. but it broke my heart that, for my grandmother, she wasn’t sure.

may we be tender and vulnerable with one another when the days are painful, when the moments drag on, when the memories haunt. may we have mirrors all around us, in people, in places, in animals, in plants, in the food we make, in the clothes we wear, in the books we read, in the things we sing and write and share. may we know ourselves so intimately that when we reach the end of our physical journeys, we can move into the everything with the knowledge that we don’t have regrets. may we be loved in each transition, may we have people who love us in each transition, may it get easier and easier and easier to be a human in community with others. may we make up the stupidest fucking holidays and celebrate them every year, if only to remind one another of the fact that love is only expansive.

onward,

sara

1. another rebellious act in my high school years i chuckle about: after receiving a letter from my other grandmother in which she said that she hoped i found god and that she would pray for me until i found him, i responded with a letter that said “keep your prayers, i don’t believe in god, and in sha’Allah, i’ll turn out fine.”