Mother’s Day Tribute

This post is a bit of a departure for me since I am generally food-centric and not always comfortable  sharing many personal thoughts. However, it is Mother’s Day. So, it feels like time to say something about the woman who was the most influential person in my life. She had a job outside the home in the 1950’s. I never asked her why she was so career-driven since she would not have been forced by any personal circumstances to work.

She managed to be a phenomenal cook and mother despite her demanding job as a clothing buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue.  She was proud of her work and held me to an incredibly high standard in school. From first grade on, she was obsessive about my homework. If I even flirted with the idea of doing a half-baked job, she would have none of it. Sometimes if my homework wasn’t up to her standards, she would make me stay up way past my bedtime to get it right. Dragon Mother before the term was fashionable.

I wasn’t the smartest kid in any class but I can assure you, I was the best prepared. And so it went. Through my entire life. Grade and high schools. College, graduate school and law school.  I never took my foot off the accelerator no matter how tired or bored I could sometimes feel. Looking back it was tough but it was worth it. What I discovered was that it is very hard to be successful and confident if you are not always fully prepared. “Winging it” is disconcerting and it never makes you feel accomplished. It makes you feel like the world is quiksand and you could slip beneath the surface at anytime. So thanks Mom for always keeping me on top of things.

Why am I writing such a different blog post today? Because when you are older and MEtired, thoughts of your own mother tend to surface and comparisons become inevitable. You see yourself at the same age your mother was for probably the first time in your life. When you are young, you view your own mother as so much older. Now we are the same in my mind. Except she isn’t here anymore, which is just the strangest/saddest/most regrettable thing.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your parents could see not only what you have become, but also what your children and grandchildren have become? My mother outlived my father by over thirty years. My father died in 1976, thus missing my law school graduation, my entire career, my wedding, the birth of all three of my children, their high school and college graduations, their weddings and the birth of my grandchildren. The list goes on and on. And as I passed the age which he was when he died (now by over a decade), I wondered what he would have thought and felt about all those many memorable milestones in his only child’s life. And I will never know, and that is one of the many hardships of losing a parent way too soon.

So on Mother’s Day I think about my Mom who survived the death of my father with such grace and dignity. Not once did she ever complain. And, while she did not live long enough to meet her great grandchildren either, she did enjoy many years with her own grandchildren. Which brings me to the grandmother comparison. Now my place in the world is largely that of a grandmother with time to appreciate every milestone, large and small. Every learned word and physical achievement is resoundingly important to me. And that is the way my own mother must have felt during the endless hours of playing Candy Land and Go Fish. She was Grandma.

It’s Mother’s Day and now I am her. I am no longer the young daughter or the young mother. I have become the only Mom I ever knew. For better or for worse. With all her faults and quirks. But she was —above all else —the most loving and unselfish mother. And, if only a small percentage of those qualities rubbed off on me, for that I am so grateful. Thinking of you Mom, on Mother’s Day and always. Thanks for all the things you taught me about making children happy and making them feel loved.