Thoughts on a Mother’s Day: A Carnation Is Still a Carnation

Without googling, I still can’t tell you what color carnation to wear to

church on a Mother's Day Sunday. As a child, my grandmother Ellen Carlisle

would remind me every year that the red carnation symbolizes your mother is

alive, while the white carnation says she has passed on. These days all I wear

is white. Both my grandmothers are gone--Mozelle Ellis in 2004 and Ellen in

2015. My birth mother Janice Yvonne Carlisle also died in 2004. On this Mother’s

Day, Janice would have turned 73.

A heart attack was the official cause of death, but

alcohol, drugs, self-neglect, and heartbreaks took Janice way before 2004. By

the time Janice died, my beautiful mother wasn’t the woman I used to watch put

on her makeup just before heading to work as a nurse at the local hospital. She

was no longer fly-girl Janice who admonished me that before I stepped out

of the door, I needed to make sure I was put together from head to toe. She was

no longer the trendsetter with a nose piercing decades before it became

fashionable. She was no longer the groovy Zen master who talked to me with

common sense knowledge about girls, sex, and life as if I were an adult even

when I was 10, 11, and 12 years old. She was no longer just cool—in her way

where she sat with a Newport between her fingers listening to music on her bomb

ass state of the art white stereo from her vast collection of records as disparate

as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album to Michael

Jackson’s Off the Wall. She was no longer the woman who had me sit

quietly listening to a professor’s lecture as she took nursing classes at St.

Francis Hospital. She was no longer that woman who could entertain a group of

my college friends, having fun joking with them or giving them love advice. She

hadn’t been that woman for some time.

Most of my life I had an innate knowledge she

battled substance abuse-whether prescribed medication or not and that Janice’s

substance abuse was largely the reason I was being raised by my grandparents,

Perry and Ellen Carlisle. Janice was able to keep those demons mostly invisible

to me when I was young, when I would spend time with her on the weekends or in

the summer. Through the years, nonetheless, her battle with addiction became

more apparent as I grew older—the sleeping in, the slurring of words, the co-dependency

with an alcoholic partner. It wasn’t, though, until the late ‘80s when I was in

college and the crack epidemic was in full swing that the reality of her drug

dependency slapped me in the face with such brute force that it became a

turning point in my relationship with Janice and how I viewed her. Just like

the hundreds of thousands of people around the country during this time, that

drug stripped her of everything including me.

I spent a lot of time in my twenties angry at

Janice for allowing alcohol and crack to take her from her--from me. I spent a

lot of time blaming her. I spent too much time longing for her to return. And I

lamented, lamented, and lamented some more, and then one day I stopped. I

believe my wife, my children, my lived life all provided me with a new

perspective. I slowly learned that addiction was not something she did, but

something she suffered from. I also realized that all my lamenting would most

likely never again revive the idolized version of the mother of my youth. I learned

I should just accept that and love her for who she was now.

Since her death nineteen years ago, I have come to

another realization. The beautiful Janice I remembered as a child never really

left. I see her in my wife Amy—that sweetness that finds worth in all people

regardless of who they are, where they come from, or what they have. And as

great as that discovery, what I found more profound was the unearthing that the

Janice Yvonne Carlisle of my youth vividly lives on in my girls. My oldest

daughter Arielle moves through life with the same joy, freedom, and humor as

Janice once did—both laughing easily and loudly—often at their own jokes. When Arielle

inhabits any place bringing her coolness, her chill, it’s groovy Janice

I see—the woman, who sported sunglasses and a full-length fur coat to my

elementary class teacher-parent event.

It’s Janice I see when I look closely at my

youngest daughter Amya; I see that same intellect, boldness, pride, and

toughness in my youngest daughter that I saw in my mother. I also see the same fragility

in my baby daughter that my mother harbored in life even as she, just like Amya,

attempted to mask it with bravado.

Ari and Amya are the spirit legacy of their grandmother Janice. And as a

result, my grown daughters, without them knowing, have provided me insights on

what my mother must have had to endure as a Black woman in a country that thinks

so little of Black girls. One of my greatest joys and most cherished memories

was watching the interactions Janice had with each of my girls. Watching Janice

with my daughters helped me to remember who she was—beautiful, smart, funny,

loving, encouraging, nonjudgmental, and now watching my mother in my daughters

will help me to never forget.