Mother's Day

Yes, I know I'm a day late, but I know y'all don't read my blog on the weekends anyway, so....

People are often confused by my relationship with my mother, but it’s really very simple. We’ve gotten along great since I was about 8-years-old and we couldn’t figure out who was in charge, so we just called it a draw and decided to be friends. In fact, by the time I left for college I was just about done raising her. She’s turned out all right, though I did leave in her formative years.

My mother is an amazing individual—her ability to remember the past twenty years of General Hospital subplots while never remembering which of her children she’s speaking to truly boggles the mind. Since my siblings were born, my name has become a twelve-syllable conglomeration of every person in our house- some days the dogs’ names are thrown in for good measure. I’ve been “whatever-your-name-is” for the past ten years, even though you’d think one would remember their first born.

Recollection is actually quite an issue for my mother, who hasn’t committed a phone number to memory since the advent of speed-dial. The only reason she knows where I went to college is because it’s printed on the top of loan bill she’s still paying-- my actual degree being a distant phrase fading in to that region of her brain reserved for most other details she’s certain she can almost recall. My major resides there with thank you notes, graduation gifts, craft projects and all the other forgotten items. I swear she doesn’t remember any of my friends’ names, but really, if she can’t get her own kids straight, she surely isn’t going to worry about anybody else’s. Probably, all she could tell you about my job is that it prevents me from answering her daily phone calls about critical issues like: “the Weather Channel says you’re cold,” “your Daddy took the railing off the back deck,” or anything she read in Reader’s Digest.

Bless her heart she does try; unfortunately the old “day late and a dollar short” is usually the best she can do. I have been dropped off and picked up late from every function I’ve ever attended- occasionally I wasn’t picked up at all. Her life operates on a ten-minute delay, and that’s if the traffic lights are in her favor. You know the road that’s “paved with good intentions?” Yeah- it’s our driveway. She was so excited this year when the package she sent me for St. Patrick’s Day actually arrived on March 17th -- of course, it contained my Valentine’s Day card, but why get bogged down with details? Nothing, however, beats my Easter basket. When I was two-years-old she began making me a stuffed cloth Easter basket. As usual, she “got a little behind” and the basket wasn’t finished in time for me to use that Easter, or the next. She did finish it though… the year I turned twenty-two.

It's not that she doesn’t want to be on top of things; it’s just that she has too many pots on the stove- none of which contain anything you’d ever want to eat. We’re talking about a woman who can kill a roast at 20 paces. A One-dish wonder (wonder if the dish is safe to eat), she is a firm believer that the power of Cream of Mushroom soup can turn any batch of random ingredients in to a casserole. As the Queen of the Slowcooker, her most famous (or infamous) recipe is the Naked Chicken in the Crock-pot- just place whole, naked chicken in pot and turn on- no liquid, seasonings or sides needed…. yum! Of course, no matter how awful the dinner was, congealed in the next day’s lunch box, it’s even worse. Other kids traded their snacks in elementary school, but one look in my lunch box and kids just gave me food out of pity. I was perhaps the only college student in America who looked forward to fall break and nice restaurant-cooked meal.

Trying to explain my life to her is an exercise in futility. You can’t defend the necessity of owning designer shoes to a woman who thinks Prada is a city in Germany. I know I’m not alone; everyone has his or her crazy mother stories. It’s odd really, how someone who can’t remember to wash your soccer uniform in time for the game can remember the exact time of your birth. How the woman who can’t remember her PIN number will never forget the first time she heard your heart beat. So maybe she takes a nap every afternoon -- she didn’t sleep a wink any time you had a fever. And maybe her dinners aren’t great, but she’ll drive all the way to school to deliver your forgotten lunchbox. And she wasn’t the Girl Scout Leader, but she’d never miss your dance recital. There’s not a picture in the baby book, but she has your first hair cut in an envelope in her dresser and your baby teeth in her jewelry box. She can still remember how you smelled the day you came home from the hospital and the first time she felt you kick in her stomach. She’s never cried as hard as she did on your first day of kindergarten or cheered as loudly as when you scored your first homerun. She doesn’t understand your clothes or your music but she knows when you need a hug. You can’t get her to wear the trendy Capri pants you bought her for her birthday, but she’ll wear with pride the awful necklace you gave her the Christmas you were five. And God, she asks so many questions about every little thing and you think, “Do you have no life?!” Of course she doesn’t- she gave her life up so you could have one.

Sometimes I don’t know what to do with the woman who took twenty years to sew my Easter basket. But I do know that after all those years, that basket was a testament to my mother’s devotion, a symbol of the little girl I will always be to her, a labor of love from the one who loves me like no other, and to this day, is the greatest gift I have ever received.