How Do You Solve a Problem Like May?
and live for each second
One solution: sit on a giant mushroom. May 2025
As I sit down to write I have to click on the X of the notification that reminds me tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Yeah, I know. No one can escape this news, no matter how they might want to. And lots of us want to.
May is a problem, one I have tried to solve. I go into some depth here about all the reasons, but what we used to call the Reader’s Digest version and we now call TL;DR is that from May 5 to May 16 I struggle through every day. It is Mike’s birthday, along with two of my children’s (from whom I am painfully estranged). It’s the anniversary of my nephew’s death and my dad’s (same day as Mike’s birthday). And the anniversary of finding out Mike has cancer. That’s not enough. It’s Mother’s Day and my mom’s birthday too. All of this in eleven days that I can’t stand. How do I make the suffering better? How do I lighten it and get through? Asking for me.
I can tell you some things that don’t work.
Pretending that it’s all fine, didyouhearme FINE. This was my approach for many years, and I turned pretending everything was fine into an olympic sport, one I won damn it, because what else was an available option? That’s right, absolutely nothing. I built a first marriage around this but I don’t recommend it. Pretending I had no feelings worked quite well for everyone except me, and it turned out I had them after all.
Distracting myself with everyone else’s happy occasions. This worked a lot better than the #1, actually. It was easier to do this when I had young children with birthdays, which meant parties to plan and cakes shaped like giant legos and question marks to construct. Unsurprisngly, this method works great for other people too. It wasn’t about me, anyway. And therein lies the problem, because when was it about me exactly?
#2 continued in force after I met Mike. Lucky me, we had four Mother’s Days together. Or, togetherish. And Mike did make effort around them. But, let’s check:
2015 - Mike in jail. That was fun.
2016 - We are in North Carolina for Ab’s college graduation.
2017 - Mike is in the hospital, newly diagnosed with cancer. Fun!
2018 - back in North Carolina again for Ab’s wedding. Mother’s Day is Mike’s birthday. We fly home that day, early in the morning.
I realize I could have not had two kids in the same week in May and maybe not fallen in love with a man who was also born that week on the day my dad died, but it’s too late to change any of that. My mother’s birthday was obviously not a thing I could control or time. Or finding out my husband had cancer. But let’s not be silly. Of course I love that I fell in love with Mike.
So what do I do now? May 5th comes, Cinco de Mayo, and the wave of sadness hits as I think of my husband in the hospital so shortly thereafter and the bottom dropping out of my world. Of thinking for five fucking seconds that I could just live this happy life with my love, that perhaps we both had paid enough already. I go get a margarita anyway, every year, because not doing that would feel worse. But I want to be this 2018 me:
May 5, 2018
Travel seems like a solution, on the surface. It is starting to seem like my solution for everything, though. It is part distraction, part inspiration. Win-win! Only there’s this: It is a little hard to time. I really prefer to be home for Mike’s birthday, smack dab in the middle of the month. I also need to be home for the Bolder Boulder, which is on Memorial Day every year - that can be as early as May 26, depending on when the last Monday in May is. That does leave at least twelve days in between, but those are not the days when I am as sad anyway. Last year I am gone for Mother’s Day weekend1 and this does help, but it’s also hard to escape the feeling that you are intruding on someone else’s party and occasion.2 Or ruining it, your presence a reminder of every bad thing that can and does happen.
There’s also this: Feeling my feelings rather than trying to escape them. The problem is that feeling my feelings feels like suffering. It feels like ugly crying in the car on the way to Fika. It feels like missing my husband, wanting him to be across the table eating what he called a fatty steak on May 14. It feels like sorrow for problems that feel unfixable, sorrow for the mom and dad I have missed my whole adult life.
And maybe a part that’s worse. Even writing this, I hear the voices of people yelling at me that I am not allowed to have feelings, that this isn’t about me. Feeling background panic with every sentence, hearing their cruel voices in my head telling me I should never have been thinking about myself in the first place. How dare I? My family of origin and first marriage really did a number on my psyche. Nothing feels safe about it at all.
But pretending it is all fine feels even worse. I just can’t. It’s not fine.
I guess what I am doing about it is raining on the parade. Reminding people that this suffering happens and some of us can’t pretend anymore that it doesn’t, even if we want to. It didn’t work anyway. The solution of gratitude and thinking about other people just feels like spiritual bypassing, spiritual bypassing for others’ convenience at that. I’m opting out.
What has helped, actually? May remains a problem, and this year little things are the solution - or, the best one I can come up with. Getting a margarita downtown on May 5th even when it is absolutely dumping snow and my mom would have said I looked like a drowned rat:
Did anyone else’s mom say they looked like a drowned rat? Just me? This is after a walk of maybe three blocks from my office.
More. A friend who knows this is hard, who cares, who follows up. A card “from” baby Lucy, with a Granny dog and a little granddaughter puppy on it. This is my first Mother’s Day as a granny!3
My husband, always. Driving to trivia on Thursday my phone switches from the eternal Enya4 of the last few days to a song that always makes me think of him: Elton John’s I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues. And then - just then - I see the license plate in front of me, which reads PANDA1. We have a running joke about pandas - one that clearly continues. “Live for each second, without hesitation, and never forget I’m your man,” Elton John sings.
As if there were ever any danger of that. Forgetting, I mean. Learning to live for each second? That’s the problem of May.
See: Mushroom pic above
the siren song is so strong though. Right now my brain is already thinking about taking a cruise the first week of May 2027.
but unfortunately I cannot celebrate with them, for totally understandable reasons (a brother’s college graduation).
after Mike’s death I listen to more Enya than 99.9% of the earth’s population
Here for you, this month and always.