This weekend marks my first Mother’s Day without my mother. The past eight months have been, for me, extremely difficult. I have been told that when you experience the death of a loved one, the first year is rough. Suddenly, all of the familiar traditions and celebrations are forever altered, or gone entirely. One less card in the mailbox, one less phone call wishing you well, one less seat at the table. The habits of a lifetime—the frequent repetition of small rituals that have become, over the course of many years, reflexive—must now be consciously, and painfully, unlearned.
It is not yet a year since my mom passed, and grief still sits at my elbow, an uninvited guest that refuses to leave.
I have gotten through my first holiday season without her, along with her birthday and my birthday. Now it is Mother’s Day, and before too long it will the first anniversary of the day she died.
So for Mother’s Day this year, instead of the card I would have mailed, the call I would have made, and the flowers I would have sent, I would like to tell you about the wonderful woman who loved me, raised me, and put up with all of my nonsense for 66 years.
My mother was born in Baltimore, Md. in December of 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. My mother’s mother was a bitter, angry, and abusive woman who drove both my grandfather and her youngest son, my beloved Uncle Yale, to suicide. She once put her hands around my mother’s neck and told her that she intended to squeeze it until my mother made a noise like a strangling chicken. My mother was 12 years old when that happened, and it was neither the first time nor the last that my grandmother chose to torture her own daughter. My mother’s Aunt Rose once saved her life by preventing my grandmother from striking her in the head with a cast iron skillet.
No wonder, then, that my mother married at the age of 19. While she was certainly in love with my father when she accepted his marriage proposal, the overarching reason for marrying him, just a year after graduating from high school, was that she was desperate to get away from her own mother.
Perhaps because her mother treated her so wretchedly, my mother resolved to be a very different kind of mother to her own children. Thus, the woman who was so horribly abused by her own mother became the loyal, loving, supportive, funny, and fascinating parent who raised me.
I had many ideas about who my mom was, even when I was very young. For starters, she was beautiful to the point of incandescence. My mother was so gorgeous that for the first six years of my life, I thought she was a movie star. When she entered a room, every head turned, every man went weak in the knees, and every wife tightened her grasp around her husband’s arm. My mother was often compared, favorably, to Alexis Smith, Audrey Hepburn, and Julie Andrews. She was so breathtaking that every single friend of mine, both male and female, fell hopelessly in love with her. Much to my chagrin, I inherited none of her good looks.
Her physical beauty was the least of the traits that made my mother so special. She often told me that beauty fades, but good character is forever. A beautiful person of poor character will, eventually, have only their poor character left to rely on. Her way of communicating this was, “Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone.”
Undoubtedly, she told me this recognizing that since I was unlikely to win a beauty pageant, I might aim, more reasonably, for the “Miss Congeniality” award. But I internalized that message from a very early age: Good character matters more than what you have, more than where you live, more than what you wear, more than how you look, and more than who you know. To this day, good character is the single most important defining feature of my closest friends.
Because my mother married young, she was pleased to have the opportunity to “grow up” with her children. When I was a toddler, she took me to the park every day, and unlike other parents, who dumped their kids into the sandbox and then sat on a bench nearby gossiping with each other, my mom got into the sandbox and played with me. We dug holes, filled buckets, and made sandcastles for hours on end. As I grew up, she purchased Schwinn bicycles for us, and she and I would frequently ride to Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors throughout the summer for a scoop of our favorite confection: Daquiri Ice.
My mother was a voracious reader. When I watched her reading, I became determined to read as well. By the time I was five years old, I had read the illustrated children’s dictionary that she had given to me for my fourth birthday, and I fell deeply and completely in love with the written word.
Mom filled my bedroom with books: “Nancy Drew,” “Curious George,” the “Happy Hollisters,” Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Allan Poe, and all of the “Mary Poppins” and “Eloise” books. It took very little time for me to work my way through those classics, at which point my mother gave me permission to read any adult title that I pulled from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the family room.
She never said no. I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” in the fourth grade, along with “Gone with the Wind” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
As I said, my mother never, ever told me that there was a book that I was not allowed to read, even when I didn’t understand half of what I was reading.
My mother didn’t really believe in giving children “stuff.” I didn’t have a lot of toys as a child, but I received, over and over again, the gift of enrichment. My mother sent me to sleep-away camp in northern Wisconsin every summer. I had art lessons, music lessons, swimming lessons, gymnastics lessons, ballet lessons (a waste of money since I was anything but graceful), and skating lessons. The “stuff” that she did give to me was always intended to promote my growth and development. Instead of toys, I had sporting equipment, musical instruments, and mountains of books. I didn’t have a Barbie doll, but I had Lincoln Logs, building blocks, jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, art supplies, a typewriter, and a library card.
Whenever we drove anywhere, my mother would inevitably become lost. It made me crazy. I would beg her to pull over and ask for directions, but her response was always the same: “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Mom was definitely an adventurer. She took me to New York when I was 13 years old. The trip was a whirlwind of sightseeing, musical theater, and unrestrained gluttony. We had gigantic corned beef and pastrami sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli and Katz’s. We ate sweets at Schraft’s. We had dinners in Little Italy and China Town. We went to see Bernadette Peters in “On the Town.” We went to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Later, as an adult, my mother took me on a cruise of wineries along the Napa River that became a bus tour when the ship ran aground on a sandbar. When I became annoyed that we were spending an entire vacation aboard a bus, she said, predictably, “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
My mom loved to sing and dance, which was fortunate, because my father was both a musician and a dancer. They used to dance in the middle of the kitchen in the evening after dinner. My mother provided a model of what a loving and romantic relationship might look like, someday, for me. Thanks to her, I am living that model today, with my treasured companion of 26 years.
Mom was a nut for music of all kinds. She filled the house with Jewish music, Broadway music, symphonic music, folk music, and music from the American songbook. She gave me The Beatles Second Album for my seventh birthday. She often took me to the ballet, the symphony, and to touring performances of Broadway musicals. When I was in the sixth grade, she pulled me out of school one day to see a matinee of the national tour of “Hair.”
I recall one afternoon during my adolescence when my friend Helen came over to my house after school. Like the wayward teens we were, Helen and I were in my bedroom with the door closed, smoking pot and listening to the Broadway cast album of “The Sound of Music.”
Suddenly, the door burst open and my mother, clad only in her bra and panty hose, leapt into the room, singing, “The hills are alive, with the sound of music!”
She really did look a lot like Julie Andrews, even in her underwear.
“What’s that smell?” my mother asked at the conclusion of her Julie Andrews tribute. Marijuana fumes filled the air. The joint we had been smoking had been quickly thrust into my pocket when my mother flew into the room, where it continued to smolder throughout her performance.
“It’s incense, Mom.”
“Well, it stinks,” she said tartly, and then went leaping out of my bedroom again, singing, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
Helen just sat there with her mouth hanging open. Not only had she never seen a friend’s mother wearing nothing but underwear before, she had certainly never seen a friend’s mother wearing nothing but underwear while flying through the air and singing the score from “The Sound of Music.”
That was my mom: one of a kind, intrepid, hilarious, and, until her very last day on earth, my best friend.
For those of you whose mothers are still alive and well, I encourage you celebrate her excessively every chance you get, and twice as excessively this weekend. Make some good memories. You won’t have her forever, and those memories, someday, will sustain you when she is gone.
Happy Mother’s Day.
