Mother's Day

I love my mother, but I'm an only child. I am her whole world, and that's scary at times. She worries constantly, which makes her nag me, which makes me crazy, which means we have our prickly moments. But on Mother's day I make a special effort to overlook the little bumps between us. I take her out, I buy her breakfast at her favorite restaurant (which is a little hole in the wall diner that reminds her of happier days when we used to take my grandfather there) and I take her somewhere like the zoo or the aquarium. Usually there’s also a stop at Big Lots or some other discount emporium. Like me, Mom is a tightwad and seizes the opportunity to spend $100 in order to save $10 whenever she can. So, I take her to CheapieMart, turn her loose with a shopping cart and suddenly a hole in the space-time continuum opens up and two hours and $200 later, we’re hauling bags of bargains out to the car.

As I get older, I realize that it's better for both of our psyches to keep some things to myself. Mom doesn't need to know about my love life, my credit-damaging monetary decisions, or any other things that might cause her head to explode with worry. Anything that hints at change is better left unmentioned. I'm done trying to argue her into believing that change can be a good thing. She’s had this mindset for as long as I can remember. When I was a teenager and expressed a desire to go to a college out of state, I remember her saying “It’s better to be bored out of your mind here than wind up dead in a ditch somewhere God knows where.” I’m not sure why she would equate going to college in Massachusetts as a sure-fire way to wind up dead in a ditch, but there you go.

I guess she got this from my grandmother. Someone who tried to sell Grandma on the concept that “when one door closes, another opens". Her reply was ‘Sure, it opens….and then you fall down the cliff that’s on the other side of the door.”