I wish I had an amusing story to share with you for Mother's Day. But my eccentric mom's been gone almost 27 years, and I have to concentrate really hard to even remember her voice. Sad, isn't it?
I'm messing with you.
My mother was unforgettable. This chain-smoking, hardworking, sarcastic bank teller - queen of the drive-in window in our little New Jersey town - provided my brother and me with a cornucopia of memories.
We knew from an early age that she wasn't like other moms.
She couldn't cook, didn't bake and, in a neighborhood filled with housewives, she always had a job. Many of our friends' mothers gently tried to build their self-esteem and confidence, while ours - the product of a Dickensian childhood - seemed determined to toughen us up.
Let's just say it wasn't all Candy Land and warm cookies at our house. When we were toddlers, for instance, my mom invented something she called "The Shrunken Head," which involved her making a scary face, pulling her hair into a topknot and chasing us around the house as we shrieked in fear.
When we graduated to board games, she made us work for a win.
Teasing was her specialty. She loved to remind me that right after I was born - back in the days when women were knocked out for birth- my father brought her flowers after peeking at me in the nursery.
"What does she look like?" my groggy mother asked. "A frog," my father supposedly replied.
Like me, my mother had no shortage of opinions. Unlike me, none of hers ever made sense. She was suspicious of folks for no good reason. People who ate Ritz crackers or Miracle Whip, or drank skim milk gave her the Willie’s.
(We were a saltine, mayo and whole-milk family.)
She didn't like people from Princeton, NJ (they put on airs) or women who didn't wear lipstick. Or women with small feet.
"That's just not right," she'd mutter anytime she spied a large person in size-6 shoes. Back in the day, before mothers knew about eating disorders, mine declared that no woman should ever weigh more than 118 pounds.
When she crept close to that magic number, she'd eat nothing but ice cream for dinner.
"I have a sweet tooth," she'd shrug. "I can't skip dessert."
She was a talented artist - I have one of her pen-and- inks framed and in my living room - who never took an art class. Heck, she never even graduated from high school, yet she was a whiz at "Jeopardy!"
She harbored a deep distrust of doctors and fought with hers when he ordered a mammogram after her mastectomy. She relented only after he guaranteed she wouldn't have to pay full price because she was down to just one breast.
Which reminds me, I owe an apology to the well-intentioned woman from the breast cancer support group who unwittingly entered my mother's Virginia Beach hospital room after mom’s surgery in 1992. I wish I'd tackled that cheerful cancer survivor in the hallway so I could have warned her that it would be a mistake to greet my mom with a hearty, "I'm here to tell you there's life after breast cancer."
"Who said there wasn't?" my mother replied with disbelief,leaving the poor volunteer speechless and backing into the corridor.
Turned out, there was life after breast cancer for my mom. It was lung cancer that got her. It's been 26 years, seven months and 26 days since I climbed onto a hospital bed, wrapped my arms around my mother and whispered into her ear, "I love you, Mom.
“You're the best mother ever."
When she didn't respond with a wisecrack, I knew. She really was slipping away.
