ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE DALLAS TIMES HERALD
Mother’s Day Meditation
Some big old lunky boy sits on the sidelines in helmet and pads looking pretty glum about the score, but when the camera zooms in on him, he looks up, grins, and what are those words he's mouthing?
Kill 'em? Remember the Alamo? Coke adds life?
Of course not. He's saying, "Hi, Mom!"
Every man is always a sonny boy to his dear old mudder, but before we wax too dewy-eyed over this eternal maternal bond, We should remember that familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a loving skepticism and unerring knowledge: Nobody truly knows a mother as does her child. So when my writing students whine that they don't know anything to write about, I pull out my "My Mother Never" exercise and simply assign them to finish that phrase.
This does inspire kindly thoughts of mom, but the depictions of her are always tainted with a leathery tang of the actual, proving the eye of the child, no matter how loving, is never clouded. Here, for instance, a son describes his mother's struggles over cooking:
"She once told us that she would rather scrub the johns in a filling station than prepare a dinner for five. Last year, she was going to start a new tradition of preparing Christmas dinner. Of course, she burned it — that was sad, since the only preparation needed was for her to warm an already cooked ham we got from a neighbor. If it weren't for restaurants, my sister and I would have starved to death."
They see all your transparent insecurities, too, mom: "When I bring new friends home to visit, mom is always afraid that they will somehow think less of me if they find the cat hair in the cracks between the cushions of our faded red couch. Or she's afraid they'll be uncomfortable sitting next to the end table with the mangled corner where our German shepherd puppy sharpened his teeth."
And what's a mom for but to teach you proper grooming? "My mother has never even gone to the grocery store without looking like a million bucks — she believes that you never know who you might run into. She's very meticulous about threads, buttons, zippers and hems. If she thought for one second that I ever safety-pinned a hem, she'd disown me."
Another writer complains good-naturedly that his mother "seemed to have radar. One time my brother and I were scheming to put a tape recorder in my sister's room when she had a friend over, and when we went to get the recorder, we found a little note on it that asked us how we would feel if someone did that to us."
Before you moms get worried that your kiddos have nothing but bemused complaints to make about you, rest assured that now and then some son or daughter extolls your unalloyed virtue: "All the older boys tormented me and told me I was too short and fat to be a Boy Scout, so when I came home from my first meeting red-faced and stiff-lipped, I told my mom I was going to quit. But she wouldn't hear of such a thing. She told me I would never be respected if I quit. (I knew I wouldn't be respected so long as I was short and fat.) I stuck it out, though, and eventually they stopped teasing me when I started outranging them.”
My own mother never put her silver dollars in anybody's bank. She hid a blue velvet pouch of 25 in a little metal pot with a screw top that was part of a floor lamp in our living room, where I found them by accident one day when I was 10. So then she took them off someplace else inside the house. Now when I go home, I sometimes sit and imagine the pouch tucked behind the books in the den or in a shoebox in her closet, someplace where fear of prying keeps me from looking closely. I'm annoyed that she won't tell me where they're hidden, even though I can guess her reason — her grandmother who raised her must have said you never knew when Yankees were going to sweep down and burn everybody's Jeff Davis dollars, and she herself saw the banks go bust during the Depression. But I've thought about them from time to time, say during the Cuban missile crisis, and even without any apocalypse in my life I can imagine a time when her own son might need a kind of money you could bite. □