Thoughts on the Cardigan

I just finished reading “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,” by Anne Lamott. I believe that I am about five to ten years late in adding my hearty endorsement to the chorus of praise for that book, but add it I must. For the uninitiated (like myself, until recently), “Traveling Mercies” is a collection of vignettes from the author’s life, focusing on her journey from agnostic childhood to drug-hazed early adulthood to single parenthood to discovering Jesus crouching in a corner of her bedroom. A sort of partial memoir, I guess. Or maybe that’s redundant. Anyway, many of the stories of Lamott’s life struck a chord with me, but the one that has stuck with me described, in hilarious and poignant fashion, a trip to the beach with her mother, younger brother, and son. Lamott writes about how she couldn’t stop herself from dwelling throughout the day on the little things about her mother that annoyed her, even while she appreciated the blessing of spending the day with three generations of Lamotts. In particular, it was the elder Lamott’s insistence on wearing a cardigan, on a warm day, to the beach, that her daughter found personally offensive.
As a born curmudgeon, whose crotchety ways have only gotten more aggravated with age, I fully embraced the attitude that allows one to object to one’s mother’s clothing choices. I, too, nag my mother about the small things: buying too many (yes, in my opinion) long, denim, linen, corduroy, fill-in-the-blank skirts; asking me how to upload an attachment to an e-mail for the two hundredth time, calling me at work to ask about something she’s perfectly capable of figuring out herself—and she would, if I weren’t readily available. My mother is an incredibly strong, smart, savvy person. She raised two children by herself and has successfully run her own business for over 30 years. Does she really need my help to determine the proper length of time to warm up her leftovers in the microwave? But it struck me, as Lamott explained, without explaining, that the cardigan/microwave-related frustration was code for all of the big stuff that is wrapped up in the mother-daughter relationship: the fear of losing her, the outrage over her intervention in our lives, the desperate desire for her involvement in our lives, the harsh perceptions and projections that we volley back and forth as soon as we are old enough to form them.
We don’t want our mothers to need to wear cardigans on warm days, to be reminded that they, too, are vulnerable, finite. It’s terrible to think of our mothers growing old and cold and fragile, so terrible that it makes us angry at the world, and who embodies the world moreso than our mothers?