Oh, Mother!

Good day, Younglings. Mother's Day is Sunday, May 14. And that's why this blog gets re-posted somewhere on social media EVERY YEAR since its original publication.

Read on, Padawans, and enlightened you will be:


In honor of Mother's Day, I'm posting the article I wrote that appeared in HER magazine, May 2009:


Oh, yes! I definitely am! And that’s perfectly okay with me.

People have always considered me a “chip off the ol’ block.” Some women would have flames bursting from their eyes if anyone told them this, but not me. Growing up with “Carol Burnett meets Elizabeth Taylor” (minus the Richard Burton element), was never dull. My mom is funny, beautiful, and doesn’t take a lot of crap from anybody. I for sure got the funny part, because if I can make people laugh, I’ve done my good deed for the day. I’m still working on the beautiful part. That always took some work, because my mother couldn’t get me to wear a dress or makeup without great gnashing of teeth. She’s been accused of dressing up to clean house. I’m accused of having too many dresses and not wearing any of them.

When I got married, I instantly became the mother of four. I helped raised two of them on an everyday basis: girls, age six and nine at the time. I skipped colic, diapers, and potty training and went straight to slumber parties and tubes of lipstick left in the pocket of a pair of pants that got put into the dryer.

After a month went by, I called my mother and said, “I apologize for everything I’ve ever done.” I was in my late twenties, so that covered a lot of ground.

All four of these children are grown now; three have children of their own. This made me a grandmother at 31. (I could insert one of those online, IM-speak acronyms of shock here, but I’ll refrain.) It wasn’t until I started hanging with the grandkids that I really noticed how much I was saying things like, “Scat, Tom!” when someone sneezed. I haven’t started calling everyone “shug” yet, but that might be a future endeavor.

I was standing in line at the local discount shopping mecca and glanced through an article about something rather unmentionable in one of those women’s magazines that likes to broadcast things that most women really don’t want to see broadcast in the checkout line, and thought, “Gee! I knew that in the fifth grade!” Because my mother told me. She knows everything, like the names of obscure actors all the way back to the 1930s. My children now ask me, “Who’s that?” when old black and white films turn up on TCM. Nine times out of ten, I know exactly who they are, thanks to excellent maternal guidance.

My mom and I definitely have different musical tastes, although she did think Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me” was kinda catchy. Without her, I wouldn’t have Frankie Laine and Andy Williams on my mp3 player, right alongside Black Sabbath and Nickelback. “The Theme for Rawhide” coming on right after “Iron Man” upsets the passengers in my car somewhat, but you know what? I really don’t care. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin…”

My mother loves to read, and I remember frequent trips to the library as a child. She introduced me to Stephen King, and we both had extreme fears of Plymouth automobiles for a while. (Remember Christine?) I don’t know if that explains my sister’s avid interest in the film version of Cujo, but oh, well. If I had time, I’d follow Mom’s lead and join a book club, but I don’t think “Building Online Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom” is on Oprah’s reading list.

Mother-daughter relationships are complicated. Every woman knows this. Especially if they survived their teenage years and still have both arms and legs. Several films have captured the dynamic: Terms of Endearment, Postcards from the Edge, Steel Magnolias, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. (Hmm…three of those starred Shirley MacLaine. Wonder what that means?) Some women strive to be like their mothers, others…not so much. I really doubt Amy Winehouse’s future children will still be telling her to go to rehab when they become adults. We won’t even mention Joan Crawford or that woman who had the octuplets. Maybe Shirley MacLaine could step in and line up everybody’s chakras.

Regardless of whatever may have happened between birth and the day we looked at a stray digital photo and said, “Oh, wait! That’s a picture of ME! I thought it was my mom!,” one thing is certain: We are all shaped into who we are as woman because of our mothers, no matter what the relationship may be. Some of us have spent every day of our lives with our mothers. Other were adopted, or separated from their mothers due to divorce or death or other circumstances. Be proud of those traits you’ve picked up, either consciously or unconsciously, and remember those special women on their day this month. Without them, you wouldn’t be reading this column, and I wouldn’t be writing it!

THANKS TO ALL THOSE MOTHERS OUT THERE!! YOU ARE LOVED!!