Falling Women and Other Stories for Mother’s Day!

“My mother taught a language no one speaks” is a line from the first short story in my collection, Falling Women and Other Stories. The sentence came to me one day during a writing exercise I was doing with students at my university. And the sentence has remained, buried in the dark soil of my heart as a metaphor for our struggle, Mother’s and mine.

Mother taught Latin, a language I never studied, in a military dependent school system, where I didn’t go to school. She was one of the first women principals in our area of eastern North Carolina and an early feminist. Like many feminists and prophets, she was unappreciated at home, especially by me. I longed for a doting, stay-at-home mom who baked and smelled like gingerbread.

I longed for a mother like the one in the title story “Falling Women,” a sweet housewife who dies before she can tell her daughters what they need to know about becoming women. Or like the narrator of “Higher Ed,” an imaginative housewife who manipulates her husband to pay for their daughter’s education.And of course the fearful, water phobic mom in “To Hold but Not Touch” is more like me. So I wasn’t able to capture Mother in words. She was a puzzle I couldn’t solved, a shore I never reached.

But Mother and I made a journey together in which we learned to appreciate each other. Through her last illness and my visits, we became friends. We enjoyed spending the shank of the day together, having dinner and watching game shows. Vana White would turn a few letters on the board, and Mother would shout out the answer. Oh to watch one more “Wheel of Fortune” with you, Mother.

If your mother is still with you, be glad and consider giving her Falling Women and Other Stories, a book of mothers, for Mother’s Day.