09-05-2025
Mother's Day is about cherished memories (and even those that aren't cherished)
Mom looked sad. Clearly, she was having a bad day. I was in high school at the time and arrived home around 4 p.m. She was in the kitchen ironing shirts, with our dachshund on the floor across from her.
When I walked in, I saw her and the dog staring at each other. Eventually, she looked at me and said, 'I think the dog is my mother.'
I looked at my mom's big sad eyes. I looked at the dog's big sad eyes. Then, I looked back at Mom.
'You mean … reincarnated,' I asked.
She suddenly seemed to realize how weird that sounded and snapped out of it.
I said, 'I don't think that's her,' and hid in my room until dinnertime.
My mom's mother died when I was an infant. Mom missed her terribly, talked about her frequently and had a soft spot in her heart for anything that celebrated motherhood, including 'I Remember Mama,' a movie I've still never seen.
I've also never read the book, seen the play, sat through the musical or watched the TV show. I've also never seen 'I Dismember Mama,' a low-budget horror film that appropriated the title.
But 'Throw Momma from the Train' was kind of fun.
My mom died in 2016. We argued for most of my life, but it was never really nasty. Usually, it was about me asserting my independence. (The first time I yelled, 'Stop treating me like a child!' I was in third grade.)
What do I remember about MY mama? I remember the drone of her Singer sewing machine in our basement. (She did 'homework' all night, to help make ends meet.)
I remember her on our blanket at Jones Beach telling my brother and me to wave at my father, who had been waving at us, nonstop, for about 10 minutes.
'Wave at your father,' she said, over and over again until a middle-aged woman came out of the water and told my mother, 'Your husband needs a towel. He jumped into a wave and lost his bathing suit.'
I remember her years working in the Young Misses department at Alexander's and taunting us with the clothes she bought for herself with her discount.
'See this dress? It was $29, marked down to $19. Then, with my discount …'
I remember buying her an answering machine and trying, in vain, to explain how easy it was to use.
'All the buttons are down here,' I said. 'To record a message, you hit record. To play a message, you hit play. To stop the tape you hit stop.'
She pretended to listen to me. Then screamed, 'How am I supposed to remember all this?'
I remember all the traditional holiday foods she prepared for us, including her Christmas Eve crab sauce and her now-infamous Easter pies.
I wrote at least 10 columns about those pies in the last 35 years, and readers still talk about them when they meet me.
The one year I tried to make the pies with her — for a column — she yelled at me, incessantly. When I sat down while kneading the dough, she howled, 'Are you crazy? Stand up! You can't roll dough sitting down!'
I can think of a million other things I remember, but space is limited.
Like many mothers, I think, she would have been happy for her two sons to become a doctor and lawyer.
But, by the early 1960s, she seemed to have accepted the fact that she was raising a writer and a mechanic.
My brother loved taking things apart and putting them back together again when he was 5 years old. By the time I was 10, I was writing stories on my very own typewriter.
In 1963, a Long Island daily published a poem I'd written in school about JFK's assassination. (My first byline!) At 21, I was running a weekly newspaper.
Mom was proud, but still insisted, 'You'd make a great lawyer.'
When I asked why, she said, very sweetly, 'Because you have a big mouth.'
No one knows you like your mom.
Happy Mother's Day.
This article originally appeared on Mother's Day memories are cherished