Another Mother's Day Without Her

Maybe it's because the lilac tree I planted in her memory is in full bloom.

Maybe it's because I just held the second great-grandchild she never will know.

Or maybe it's this simple: It's my 10th Mother's Day without her.

For whatever reason — or many reasons — I really miss my mom.

To those who are middle-aged with mothers still very much alive, I admit this without equivocation or shame: I envy you. I mean it. Even if all you do is argue or worry because of her, I still want to trade places.

Reminders of my mother come at the most unexpected times — never invited and always springing the hinges on doors I thought were locked securely.

I'm running an errand and cross paths with a woman my age who calls out, "Hey, Mom, look at this."

I'm having lunch with a friend, when a gray-haired woman sitting two booths away leans across the table and says with a laugh, "Oh, listen to what Dad did."

I'm shopping alone, wriggling all my insecurities into a dress, when I hear an exchange outside the dressing room door:

"I dunno. I think it makes me look fat."

"Honey, if I had your hips, I'd wear that dress every day."

"Oh, Mom."

What a ridiculous time for my eyes to sting.

A few days ago, feminist writer Marilyn French died. Immediately, I thought of Dad's phone call to me at college — one of only three he ever made. It was 1978, late evening, and he wanted to know one thing: "What the hell is that book you gave your mother?"

He was referring to French's "The Women's Room," which I had mailed to Mom a week earlier from Kent State. In an earnest but presumptuous attempt to encourage my mother to examine her life, I suggested she might identify with the 1950s housewife who reconsiders her worth after her doctor husband divorces her and she returns to college in the 1970s.

Dad called that evening after my tiny mother, in an unprecedented act of provocation, glanced up from her book, took one look at her husband reclining in his La-Z-Boy and nursing a Stroh's, and hurled the paperback at his head.

"It's not funny," my dad barked over the phone.

"You keep your books to yourself."

In a call the next day, Mom said "The Women's Room" was making her angry.

"Then stop reading it," I said.

"No," she said. "It's making me angry in a good way."

All her adult life, my mother lived for others. She took care of my father and us four kids, and when it was clear I couldn't go to college on just Dad's wages, she went to work at the local hospital to take care of strangers. In her last years, she was a hospice home-care provider, and the staff joked that whenever Mom showed up, people lived longer.

Earlier this year, I thought about her a lot, as one home-care worker after another tended to our beloved relative who was dying. Like my mother, most of them never had known a day of college and worked hard at being invisible in someone else's home. But our highly educated family was almost entirely dependent on them for the kind of care that makes all the difference in a loved one's final days. Their expert hands and world-weary wisdom made me proud of my mother all over again.

My mom was 19 when she became pregnant with me, and over the years, my friends with much older mothers joked that I would be stuck with her for a long, long time. I never realized how much I counted on that until she died at 62. The longer I live the more questions I have that only she could have answered.

I must settle for memories instead. When my mom was 56, I talked her into taking her first plane trip. We went to Colonial Williamsburg for a long weekend. I had tiny bruises on my thigh from her nervous squeeze during liftoff, but she took to the friendly skies and decided to fly again. To Israel.

Recently I stumbled across her passport. Deep breath, open slowly . She looks so proud in the photo, so ready for life's next adventure.

The passport has an expiration date, long passed.

No such thing for the longings of a grown daughter's heart.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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