Why My Mother Threw the Ham

Mother’s Day, May 10, 2020

My sister Linda and I are convinced she’d had enough of being a mother. Four kids born over the span of 17 years: She was washing diapers, preparing meals, folding clothes, mopping floors and scouring our one bathroom continuously through four different administrations — from Roosevelt to JFK. When my oldest brother graduated high school, my youngest brother was fourteen months old, colicky and not an especially good sleeper. And this was back before diapers were disposable or microwaves existed except in laboratories.

It was an Easter, as we recall it, and the ham ended up on the kitchen linoleum. Could it have slipped from her hands because of the defective potholders I had loomed in my brief experiment with crafts? Perhaps. But we prefer to think of it as an act of aggression with a strong dose of agency in it. You see, we knew something as children that we couldn’t articulate until later in life: she had a Big Job and we were of little help. Sure, we all had chores — we washed up after dinner, made beds, ironed the occasional curtain. But she held all the work of the home in her portfolio, and she did this on a meager budget and with great skill, when we look at in retrospect. The most affirmation she ever received was an annual Mother’s Day token of some useless milk glass from the gift shop in town. I remember the small white sled we gave her one year, pooling our babysitting income. She used it for matchbooks, bobby pins and broken pencils, best I can recall.

And that’s how it was with mothers way back when. Very little fanfare, not like today where we lift them up, venerate them, spend $10 on a card with pop-up features. Husbands thank the mothers of their children, and I think children follow suit, more rich expressions of appreciation than fifty years ago. There are poems and songs, picture frames that say “Best Mom Ever,” myriad support groups and even magazines dedicated to mothers now. Back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, it was supreme, unrelenting responsibility. No daycare, no money for babysitters, just put your nose to the grindstone and get the job done, day after day, year after year. And don’t expect any “happy faces.” There were no happy faces in mothering way back when.

When our youngest brother went to school, Claire got a job. She found work for which she was paid — office work — and she was good at it. In another era, she would have easily become the COO of a major corporation. She could sniff out bullshit at 50 paces, she was smart and orderly, and she wasn’t easily intimidated. In reconstructing the ham debacle, one theory is that it was the early blush of her fulfilling day job and here she was in her contrasting reality materializing a holiday meal, on a rainy spring Sunday with a brood of kids who had permanently stained the Formica counter purple the night before while dyeing eggs. We picture the ham splattered on the floor, its carefully constructed dressing of pineapple rounds and maraschino cherries lost forever in a sloppy mess.

We did what kids did back then. We went out on the front lawn and talked quietly about whether our mother was crazy. At no point did we seize on the idea that perhaps we were responsible for her challenges as we struggled through our days failing geometry (Linda), smoking out the window (Phil), rejecting most meals in favor of Lucky Charms (youngest brother Tom) or talking back and refusing to comply with the house rules (I guess that was me.) At a certain point, as we stood in the misting rain, the screen door opened and she motioned us in. On the table was a bubbling hot lasagna. And that’s what we had that year.

We can’t remember what happened to the ham because our mother didn’t like to throw food away. But it’s one more reason she was kind of brilliant, she had a backup meal ready to go. Italians did that on Sundays — a meat course, a macaroni course — we didn’t use the word “pasta” back then. And we scarfed it down happily with no mention of the lost ham at our dining room table with its pastel liner beneath a lace topper. After dinner, my father cracked some walnuts and one of us asked “What’s for dessert?”

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