Unforgettable... My Mother

I wish I had an amusing story to share with you for Mother's Day. But my eccentric mom's been dead almost 24 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 my friends' mothers gently tried to build their self-esteem and confidence, while mine - the product of a Dickensian childhood - seemed determined to toughen up my brother and me.

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 frizzy 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.

Honesty was her speciality. When I auditioned for a singing part in a dance recital and didn’t get it, she didn’t tell me to try again next year.

“You can’t carry a tune,” she shrugged. “So what?Stick to dancing.”

She often reminded me that right after I was born - back in the days when women were knocked out for birth - my father brought her flowers after seeing me in the nursery.

"What does she look like?" my groggy mother asked.

"A frog," replied my father.

I’ve seen the pictures. He was right.

Like me, my mother had no shortage of opinions and not just about politics. Her list of likes and dislikes was longer than Leviticus.

She frowned upon people who ate Ritz crackers or Miracle Whip, or drank skim milk, for example. (We were a saltine, mayo and whole-milk family.)

She didn't like people from Princeton because they were snooty. She couldn’t understand women who didn't wear lipstick or those who tottered around on small feet.

"That's just not right," she'd mutter anytime she spied a fat woman in size-6 shoes.

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 as we stared morosely at whatever she’d made for dinner using cream of mushroom soup and paper-thin pork chops. "I need to lose weight and I can’t skip dessert.”

She was a gifted artist - I have one of her pen-and-inks 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 volunteer from the breast cancer support group who unwittingly entered my mother's Virginia Beach hospital room after her surgery in 1992.

I wish I'd tackled that 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 a look of disgust that sent the poor woman scurrying into the corridor.

Turned out, there was life after breast cancer for my mom. It was lung cancer that got her.

It's been 23 years, eight months and 22 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.