Mom!

Hey guys!  I wanted to post this little piece that I wrote about my mom for an Oprah thingy on her web site.  I wrote it just being funny and sent it to my sisters and mom.  Well, it began to get passed around and read at groups and meetings and whammy, people who don’t even know my mom thought it was funny.  I guess because a lot of moms are C+ moms and we love them just the same!  Enjoy!

My mom is by no means the Greatest Mom in the world.  With a very wide smile on my face I can sincerely say that she is at best a C+ Mom.  She’s not one of the predestine, genetically disposed, women who dedicate their entire lives to the well being and happiness, and we must not forget safety, to their children.  On the contrary, my mom was more like a big sister to us than a mother, hands down.  She just wasn’t wired for domesticity.  Her most cooked meal in the 70’s was Velveeta melted on fried hamburger and put on top of whatever was available.  It wasn’t pleasant.  She was never at our sporting event which numbered in the hundreds, and I didn’t know socks were supposed to match until I went to college.  Don’t get me wrong.  Even though my mother was in no way cut out for motherhood she somehow supernaturally kept trying.  Saddled with the Catholic doctrine of no birth control and serious, much spoken of healthy sex drive, she and my dad happily produced 6 children.  We consistently ran out of toilet paper, milk and underwear.  We turned th channel on our television with a wrench. We laughed, wrestled, and board gamed our way through childhood with clothes on that she made in about a half hour.  She chatted loudly on the phone while she pushed the vacuum and sang way off key into a soup ladle as she did the dishes. If we didn’t do a good job cleaning the bathroom she came, flung Comment everywhere and said try again.  If we didn’t put our dirty laundry downstairs in the morning she hung it out on the bushes in our front yard for all our school friends to see and laugh at.  One drastic morning she loaded it all into our little red wagon and left it sit in front of our school.  Now I realize those kids born to the psychotically wonderful mothers would need therapy after such an event but we laughed our heads off and made our youngest sister Jackie pull the wagon home. That was our mom, half cracked and loads of fun.  We thought kids with Bike helmets were nerds as we swung on the cat walk under neath the local bridge 60 feet in the air.  We threw tomatoes at cop cars and ran like the Dickens as the well mothered children lie clean in their beds.  At the end of the day we stayed up too late watching The Late Show and had popcorn for supper all the while snuggled under a blanket with too many siblings all clinging to mom.  I’ll take my C+ mom over the world’s best any day.  She’s funnier, prettier, more well rounded than any of your super moms, she helps people in need, cries like a baby if you tell her a sob story, and alway has extra Velveeta and Soda Crackers if your hungry.  She’ a blast on vacation, never meddles in her children’s marriages, and buys God awful Christmas presents.  But she’s mine and that’s good enough for me!

Mom and Aunt Kathy Rose at Jackie’s.