What Mom Really Wants for Mother's Day

When I told my fourteen-year-old daughter that what I really wanted for Mother’s Day was to hear her perform the Bach A-minor concerto onstage in Woolsey Hall at Yale University, she rolled her eyeballs and said in that teenage girl voice that only bona fide teenage girls can do: “That’s not what I had in mind, Mooooom.”


“But it’s what I really want,” I replied.


My completely earnest request was met with more eye ball rolling, swooshing of the hair over the neck, arms crossed under the chest and complete silence for most of the hour-long drive to New Haven.


We wound up going, my daughter and I, and, as far as I’m concerned, I got what I really wanted for Mother’s Day. She played beautifully and the afternoon concert more than filled my cup. So I don’t want the flowers. Don’t want the chocolate (okay, so maybe if it’s extra dark, I’ll cave in). And certainly don’t want the plush animal (seriously, who are the teddy bear companies kidding?!?)


My daughter had “in mind” a mani/pedi, my favorite indulgence on the planet…and maybe even in the entire galaxy. Give me freshly sculpted fingernails and fiercely loofahed feet and I’m one smiling mom. So I felt confident that, with the “what I really wanted concert” behind me and a possible mani/pedi ahead of me, that the week leading up to Mother’s Day would be smooth sailing.


And then a flyer poked out of the newspaper and a gadget caught my eye. Well, not really a gadget per se. It was a digital camera. Well, it was a digital camera attached to a photo printer, if you want to be exact about it. And it looked so, well, easy. It was small and slick and adorable all at the same time. And, most importantly, it looked like it was idiot-proof. It appealed—strongly—to me, the resident technology idiot.


Now, I’m not pretending to be an idiot. Not wanting to sound humbly self-effacing or anything of that nature. No. I’m a rather smart cookie and I’m proud of that. But technology? Well, you see, the tech craze just happened to coincide with my rearing of that fourth kid as well as the premature onset of menopause, and, while not using either as the perfect excuse for being technologically-retarded, given that the final push of childbirth (and the mere experience of pregnancy) depletes brain cells and that menopause in and of itself has been scientifically proven to cause severe lapses in mental prowess, heck: if it’s good enough for the American Medical Association, it’s good enough for me. Childbirth and premature menopause cause technological retardation, OK?


So spying an ad for an idiot-proof digital camera really sparked my interest. And I thought, “Now that’s what I really want for Mother’s Day.” I am dreadfully and hopelessly behind in organizing my “memories” (does anyone even use the word “photos” anymore?) and the whole conversion of film to disc to online storage to email ordering thing has really gotten me down. Just when I got the whole take-the-photos-to-the-drugstore (now there’s an archaic word for you)-to-get-developed ritual down pat, along came digital photography. (I think I was in childbirth #4 around that time). With fewer brain cells with which to figure this one out, I turned the photography division of labor over to hubby. He got a kick out of it, and about four digital cameras later, has a multitude of files stored on my laptop, which I can never quite find when I need them. But he’s convinced me that they are in there somewhere.


Now lest you think I have completely lost my mind, let me assure you that there is a whole segment of women in the universe who are in exactly the same age group/life stage/hormonal imbalance level who understand EXACTLY what I’m saying: we got caught between the proverbial rock and technology hard place because we failed to time life perfectly. We’re bright, highly educated women who desire more than anything to have perfectly preserved memories of our children’s happy childhoods—but we now have no clear idea how to do it. The lady I met at the “drugstore” a few weeks ago confirmed my observation: we struck up a quick friendship while scanning photos into the machine and kibitzing about the technology rock-hard-place thing. We commiserated with each other about the inherent difficulty of it all (and while we were at it, swapped cell phone data entry horror stories, too) and we shared ideas of how we did—or did not—do the new technology photo/memory bit.


What I really want for Mother’s Day is a new digital camera and a matching photo printer. I do not want the manual nor do I want to read anything; I want my husband to sit down with me for a half hour and tell me exactly how to do it. I do not want to know all the tricks of this new trade; I just want him to sit down at my laptop and tell me how to retrieve all of the files he created for me which I cannot find. And then I want him to tell me how to print them out so that I can organize them into the beautiful books I bought after childbirth #2 when I merely glued those suckers in and wrote captions out long hand. No stickers. No brads and studs. No countless, colored versions of the alphabet printed on plastic-coated sheets. Just tell me—or show me—how to take a picture, print it out and get it into an album. Show me how to go from the push of the camera’s button to the computer. Show me how to plug a very short cord into something so that by the count of “three” I have a photo not just in my hand, but archivally preserved into my album!


I figure that there are at least ten million of us moms out here (if I’m doing the math correctly) who will find ourselves in this predicament on Mother’s Day. We’re haplessly watching the technological world swirl by, fazed by our lack of familiarity with it and by our inability to tackle it, yet unfazed by whippersnapper moms who already have all of this figured out (for we have the luxury of recounting wonderful successes, albeit technologically un-savvy ones, accomplished over the past ten to twenty years that techie-guru moms strongly desire, even if they haven’t yet verbalized or consciously realized it yet).


What we mothers really want for Mother’s Day is a husband or a teen—or heck, even a toddler—to show us how to do this stuff. To move us, slowly and tenderly, out of the place in which we have so lovingly settled, and into the fast-moving technological world which frightens and confuses and amazes us.


And if I can’t get all of the above, what I really want for Mother’s Day is just a few great pictures of my family. You could throw in the mani/pedi just in case—and dark chocolate never hurts—but some pictures taken, printed and gosh, maybe even organized onto a page in my album, and I’d say that Mother’s Day would be just swell.


Happy, happy Mother’s Day!


Carolina