Not Mothers' Day

It's not Mother's Day yet, and, if the truth were told, I was never much of a mother/daughter kid. Of course I loved my mom, and, of course, I respected her, but we weren't the classic "let's go shopping" or "come over for dinner" pair. She didn't teach me how to use makeup, or talk to me about boys, or even nag me about grades or worry with me about college applications. It didn't help that since I graduated from college, I've never lived closer than an hour or two away--and sometimes a lot farther.  I was always the afterthought daughter, simply because I wasn't there most of the time.

However, there are times now that I say quiet 'thank you's to my mom, moments when I stop and realize that she taught me more than I ever knew. I'm not Suzy Homemaker by any stretch of the imagination. I don't iron things like Mom did: shirts, blouses, tablecloths, napkins, sheets (What!??!! People IRON their sheets??? I don't think even she did that.) I don't cook dinner every night. My laundry sometimes sits in the washer for a day or so before I get around to putting it in the dryer. My housecleaning is on the order of my Roomba--I bump around randomly from location to location, cleaning up as I go along--and sooner or later, the law of probabilities says that I will have cleaned the whole house. Maybe. Not for me the days of top-to-bottom vacuuming and dusting and clutter removal. That was not in the DNA my mom imparted to me.

Instead I think of her when I'm baking or trying a new recipe. Not necessarily because she was the best cook I've ever met. She wasn't. But she was never hesitant about trying something different now and then. I remember her making what she called 'pizza' before anyone thought of making it at home. (It was terrible, but we didn't know any better till we tasted the real thing..) Outside the kitchen,  I remember her knocking down a wall in the house because she wanted to open up our dining room to the living room. I remember her rock garden, for which she hauled rocks in a wheelbarrow (from god-knows-where) because she wanted to tame the hill at the foot of our yard. I can still feel the warmth of that big brown flat rock I used to sit on --when I was conscripted to weed that garden--and can see in my mind the violets that peeked out from behind it.

I think of her in the garden because she could make anything grow--except peonies. Lilacs that dominated the side of the house. Shasta daisies and flowering cherries and forsythia and flowering quince (that grew little hard fruits that you could pelt the kids next door with)..Mom knew all the names of all the flowers and trees and shrubs--and I did too. That's not a skill I appreciated till I found out that not everyone knows that stuff. To this day, I pick plants according to the layout of that house on Radecke Avenue. This plant does well in shade, because it was planted on the LEFT side of the house, while THAT one needs sun because Mom always had it out front.

I learned any number of things without realizing it--and without acknowledging it. Baking and reading and planting and patience and tolerance (did I mention her telling off a neighbor who made some disparaging remark about a high school friend of ours who was black?) and whatever other  everyday virtues I might have acquired. Mom gave her time and herself to just about every person she met. She used to take buses cross-town (a long haul, believe me) to visit an old woman she'd cared for in a stint when she worked at a nursing home--because Mrs. Stein didn't have any family to visit her. Once a week, she took buses again to go and clean her mother-in-law's house because no hired 'girl' did it right. She taught me how to scrub a floor and clean a kitchen and make a bed with hospital corners (she had been a nurse.) I am not as basically good as my mom was, but she gave me one hell of an example: hard work, kindliness, creativity, perseverance, making do, paying attention, service...

I think the most telling story of our relationship was after I left home to go to grad school. I rented an apartment with two friends in Charlottesville, and after several months, we were sitting around talking about family. I happened to mention that my mom and I weren't that close. My roommate looked rather taken aback. "I never would have guessed that," she said. "You talk about her all the time."

It may not be in what I actually say. It may be in the way I live. Say things about my mom? I guess I do.