Ten years ago, I wrote the following column for my then-67-year-old mom on Mother's Day. This morning, as most every day, we had a chat that ran the gamut from what's wrong with Republicans (we still haven't figured that one out) to why my garden won't grow to what we're reading and how big the rock she grew up under had to be to house her whole family. She loves David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, a good book, euchre, the outdoors, tearjerker movies and flowers. She doesn’t like whiners, indoor dogs, beer, the F-bomb or eye shadow. I have never called her "Helen." At 77, she tells me, it would be weird if I called her anything but "Mommy." "That's my name," she says with a smile. "Don't wear it out."


She makes the world's best chili and blackberry jam, encourages me to speak my mind and is the only person I know whose laughter really peals.

She taught me how to tell time, tie my shoes, use right-handed scissors on my left hand and later, how to change the oil in a 1969 Falcon.

She could work all day in a factory, come home, take a bath and entertain my friends and me as if she were a cross between Donna Reed and Paul Bunyan -- all before heading to the field to farm tobacco with my father.

I am not sure when I realized my mother was a flesh-and-blood woman, who along the way maybe had a dream or two that didn't involve her kids or husband, or her mother, who lived with us for 23 years.

To hear her tell it, you see, we children, and the grandchildren, are her dreams come true.

And I believe her, when I go home, and she runs out the door to stumble over her three crazy dogs and greet me with what I call the Mommy Smile. We hug. She swears she'll get rid of all of us one day. She doesn't, because she's, well, Mommy.

Life lessons

Before she became Mommy, my mother was a varsity cheerleader and valedictorian of the Class of 1950 at Renaker High School. In her senior photo, Helen -- that was her name then -- is a stunner with wavy brown hair and cheerful eyes. She is smiling, as she always does in my mind.

Instead of going to college, she married my father and had three children, with yours truly in the middle.



When I was 4, my brother was a blob in a bassinet, and my sister, five years my senior, was at school five days a week. So my mother, then 28, and I exercised to Jack LaLanne's TV show, read stories and had tea parties. And every day, not long after my sister got on the bus, I'd demand to play school.

Every hour or so, I'd ask my mom what Linda would be doing at that moment, and we'd do the same: Math. Spelling. Recess. "She's having a snack," my mom would say once a day.

I would carefully divide my candy into two pieces and ask my mother to put Linda's share in the refrigerator. She told me not to expect Linda to save half of her candy for me.

I am sitting here right now with a frosted honey bun. I am not saving any of it for anyone. My mother taught me well.

Friends forever

I'm not sure when my mother became my friend, because I can't remember when she wasn't.


Perhaps it was when we were baking cookies, and, so the story goes, I looked up and said, "You're a good mommy."

Perhaps it was when I was a 17-year-old senior, and she dropped me off on her way to work each day so that I could be on a school TV program. On special days, we stopped at a grocery store for breakfast and shared warm baked goods in the front seat of her station wagon, laughing at each other as we wiped cinnamon sugar off our chins and envisioned what might happen in the future. Perhaps it's then that we forged a bond that didn't shatter on the rare occasions that my actions broke her heart and my words cut it to ribbons.

Or, maybe it was when I watched her care for her mother as Grandma was dying.

Perhaps it doesn't matter, because when we do our best, it's not necessary, Mommy always tells me, to worry about things we cannot change.

And I believe her, when she comes running out of the house, smiling that Mommy Smile and swearing she'll get rid of everything and move to Florida.

Because we have no regrets.

And no time to worry about such nonsense anyway.