Reasons I Love My Mother

Reason #365:

She lived her life with grace.

Whether she was setting the table for Thanksgiving dinner or remembering to get birthday presents for the neighbor children, she did it with grace. When she walked away from a bad first marriage at the age of twenty-seven and when she insisted on still having a Christmas two days after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she did it with grace.

When I was in New York and she’d remember to call the moment after I was supposed to hear good news, that was grace. Whenever I wasn’t there to pick up and she’d leave a message, she’d ramble on for almost a decade and—well, on second thought…there was no grace in those voicemails. There was just eleven goodbyes and then three and a half minutes of her trying to figure out how to hang up the phone before finally dropping it under one of the car seats.

But when I came home from New York and she left out a towel and bought all my favorite foods and turned down the bed and left a note welcoming me, that was grace. And when I would leave again, back to New York, and she would wait on the curb smiling and waving and giving the sign for ‘I love you’ until I was completely out of sight, well, you get the point…there was a whole lot of grace involved.

She just had it. Grace was just something she had.

And if she was ever lacking any, she always had an extra tea light handy or that one “Sounds of the Seasons” CD she played nine months out of the year, ready to turn on.

From the years she raised me and my sister alone while she supported herself and finished college, to the family trips where she just laughed as luggage flew off the roof of our Aerostar van because it wasn’t bungeed down properly, to the way that she died.

She did it all with grace.

She was a lovely woman to have known and a lovely mother to have had.

So thank you mom. I’ll be seeing you.

Reason #364:

We never had that period where we didn’t talk.

I’m so glad I that can’t look back and point to a single thing that I regret about our relationship. I was there for her, I know I was. And I know she felt loved by me, and cared for by me, because she told me all the time.

Before she left, she said everything that needed to be said, and so did I. So for all of the terrible sadness that surrounded her dying, at least thank god for that.

Reason #363:

Today we’re gonna get real.

Reason #85, all those months ago, reminisced about a funny trait of my mom’s - that when she’d laugh really hard, she would threaten that we were about to make her pee.

But now it’s time to pull the gloves off.

Last summer, I went home to visit my mom, and my sisters and I were sitting outside at the backyard table. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it got my mom to laughing. Then really, really laughing.

Then, this happened, pretty much verbatim:

“Hahaha stop making me laugh, I’m gonna pee! I’m gonna pee! Hahaha, stop, stop! I’m gonna pee!

Oh god. Oh god. I’m peeing! I’m peeing. I am peeing my pants right now! Oh no! Hahahah, stop making me laugh! I’m really peeing right now!

Okay, I peed. I peed. I really just peed! Hahahaha! You guys, you made me pee my pants!”

She literally gave us a play-by-play as she peed her pants in front of us.

Classic Mom.

Reason #362:

Flowers remind me of my mother, because she had them everywhere. Literally on every horizontal surface in our home.

She bought new flowers almost every other week for our house, and had tons of hanging flower pots in our backyard. I really loved it because they brightened up the place and made it feel homey, but man oh man, you sure do realize how many flowers one woman has when it is your job to water them all while she is sick. I remember her asking me to water them each day for her, and then me slowly realizing this was a legitimate part-time job that should come with a W-9.

Literally: She. Had. Flowers. Everywhere.

And then, because I’m dramatic, I would get worried when I’d go a few days without watering them. If she was particularly sick and the family had bigger fish to fry than cleaning the house, I wouldn’t water them at all. Then afterward, I would notice some of them wilting, and panic. I had decided that the flowers’ health was directly proportional to my mom’s health. Only I don’t think I ever really believed this; it just seemed like a perfect metaphor someone like me should latch onto, so I would, even though I knew it was silly.

When my mom came to visit my office at The Onion last year, she brought me a plant to liven up my desk. Shortly thereafter, I moved back to California to be with her, and while I was there, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been watering it for a couple of months, and that when I returned to work, it would be dead. I allowed that to let me spiral, seizing onto that all-too-perfect metaphor.

So when my mom passed, I took great pains to keep watering her plants for her. I didn’t want to let my mom down because I knew how much she liked her house to be just so, but it also just seemed like something a character in a movie would do after their mother had died. I don’t know why, but sometimes when I’m sad I start unintentionally (or intentionally) picturing my situation as if it is a movie.

I can be pretty insufferable.

When I got back from Europe, all the plants in my mom’s backyard were dead. Some of the potted plants were gone, too; they had been thrown away. It would have been really easy for me to spiral. A) because that’s what someone in a movie or book would do, and B) because it was another thing about my mom that was now over. I liked still having plants in the home that she bought. I liked lighting tea lights that she herself had purchased. And I have liked writing this blog because I started it while she was alive.

In a couple of days, this blog will be over too. And that’s okay. Because while I could easily spiral and accidentally (purposely) walk down the street listening to sad music and feeling sad about it, I can instead: A) remind myself that that’s just a scene from every indie movie you’ve ever scene, B) realize that me being sad isn’t about flowers being thrown away or a blog ending, it’s about my mom having to die at the stupid-young age of forty-nine, and C) picture my mom saying, “Stop it, don’t obsess over little things so much. It was a very nice thing you did, and now it’s over. And that’s okay. They’re just flowers. It’s just a blog. Go call your sisters.”

Reason #361:

Big car trips were fun with my mom. We would always plan to leave at six, be really close to leaving by seven, and then finally leave at around eleven thirty, give or take.

And that’s just when we would pull out of the driveway. We would then have to go to Starbucks for coffee, and then after that, Del Taco for some breakfast burritos. By the time we were actually on the freeway by well after noon, our car already looked like we had been living in it for weeks.

My mom was the same way about shopping trips. Shopping would eventually get done, but not before getting some sort of coffee or pretzel. There was just an order to things, and skipping right to the shopping would have made no sense to anyone involved.

On long car trips when I was in middle and high school, my dad would make us say the Rosary out loud together. Yep, the Rosary. For those that don’t know, that’s where you count on beads and say The Hail Mary and The Lord’s Prayer until you’ve talked for so long that you’ve lost your voice. We would even all hold hands — my dad would have one hand on the wheel, and be holding my mom’s hand with the other. Then the chain of hand-holding would continue throughout the car. I hated doing this when I was little, and writing about it now, I feel like this story should end with some lesson about how I came to learn that I was in a cult. But I wasn’t. I was just on an eight-hour drive to Newport Beach.

But sarcasm aside, I really liked that my mom and dad held hands sometimes while they drove. Even when they weren’t doing some 45-minute long prayer. Sometimes, one of them would just reach over and they’d hold hands while my dad drove.

It was nice.

Reason #360:

Today is my sister Katie’s 20th birthday. So today’s reason will be a joint “Reason I Love My Mother” and “Reason I Love My Sister”.

My mom was sick during Katie’s last year in high school and first year of college. For as hard a time as I had with my mom being sick - leaving work all the time, flying back and forth from California from New York, constantly worrying about being so far away - I can not imagine what it would have been like to go through the death of my mother as a teenager. I hate that I only got twenty-six years with her, but I hate even more that Katie only got nineteen.

Last August, we moved Katie into her sophomore year apartment without my mom, because she was too sick to come. It was a sad, emotional day. Frankly, it was terrible. One of the worst days I can remember from the whole experience.

But Katie got through it. Because she is a wonderful, weird, funny, offbeat person. She makes me laugh, she confuses me, and she usually seems both really young and oddly mature at the same time. At my mom’s memorial service, her friends said that Katie is a lot like my mother in that when she walks into a room, you know that she is there immediately.

It’s true.

It was hard on my mom, too, knowing that her sickness was affecting Katie’s “fun years” - she wanted Katie to enjoy her senior year and be excited to head off to college without the drama of a sick family member. And even though that was the least of Katie’s worries - what really mattered was my mom getting better and feeling loved and cared for while she was sick - my mom did her damnedest to make things normal for Katie. She showed up to Katie’s high school graduation and threw her a graduation party in our backyard while she was going through chemo and wearing a wig that made her self-conscious. She made a point of going down to Sonoma State after Katie was moved in so she could see her dorm in person, even though she was pretty weak that day. And she talked and listened to Katie whenever she needed a mother, no matter how sick she was feeling.

To say my mom’s illness was hard on Katie would be a huge understatement, and to assume that I know what she went through at all would be inappropriate, but coming out of this whole experience, I have been nothing but impressed by her. And I know my mom would be, too.

Today she turns 20.

She had a helluva time getting here, but she did it. And I love her.

Reason #359:

When my mom finally had to go bald, a couple of us made half-hearted comments along the lines of, “We’ll shave our heads too, in solidarity with you!”. I remember saying this once, too — quietly, perhaps even out of earshot.

At one point, one of her best friends offered to shave her head, and my mom said no, she didn’t want to have to look at yet another bald head for all those months.

That being said, my mom’s friend Bonnie should get credit: she said from day one that she would not be shaving any part of her head in solidarity with anyone ever.

Reason #358:

During me and my sister’s bi-monthly trips down to southern California to see our biological father, my mom would do everything in her power to make the flights comfortable since she couldn’t be on them with us.

Do you know those little plane games they sell at the airport? The ones where you have to peel stickers and then put them on their correct number and then once they’re all in their proper place, they make out a picture? She bought us a lot of those for us. And a lot of every other type of game. Sometimes when I’m at the airport and see them, I think of her. My sister Janelle just saw one of them the other day and bought it for me because she knew it would remind me of mom.

My mom also tried to hook us up with flight attendants who would be nice to us and make us feel at home on the plane. We flew about 200 times a year, so my mom really wanted us to not feel scared or lonely. We ended up getting to know the flight attendants pretty well, and on some flights, they would let us pass out the peanuts for them. We even made tips a lot of the time.

I like that Janelle and I have little things like those plane games to remind us of how thoughtful our mom was. I forget about some of those things and then when I’m reminded of them, I think, “Oh awesome! Another thing I have of her!”.

Reason #357:

She loved wrapping things.

At Christmas, she even individually wrapped many of the stocking stuffers. In our Easter baskets, things were wrapped.

And the week or two before Christmas, she would usually take an entire sick day from work so that she could stay home, listen to Christmas music, and just wrap things all day by herself.

Reason #356:

When she was younger, she could travel upwards of thirty minutes by foot and/or boat to buy twenty-five cents worth of candy.

This is fact.

I met one of her old high school friends yesterday on the lake. She introduced herself and I immediately recognized her name; instantly, stories about her came flooding back to me. And one of the very first things she remembered about my mom was how she loved her candy and how the two of them would travel far and wide to buy a quarter’s worth of anything they could get their hands on.

I would like to think this is where I get my going-out-at-two-in-the-morning-to-buy-Pringles-and-Mountain-Dew from.

Reason #355:

Today would have been my mom’s 50th birthday.

I almost don’t know what to say; I keep wanting today’s reason to be “EVERYTHING!”, but that would defeat the point of this project.

I love that I feel like I still have a relationship with her. People told me this would happen and I thought they were just being nice or precious or were maybe just more religious or spiritual than I could ever be. But it’s true; I do still feel very much like she’s here and alive, and I think that is a testament not to my religious beliefs, but to the impact she made on my life. I have literally talked out loud to her to tell her about my day on many occasions. I have asked her questions aloud, waited for an answer, then asked her another question, as if she had answered the first. What am I doing when I do this? It’s silly, and I know it’s silly in the moment, but I do it anyway. Because it’s sort of been working.

When I’m sad, I can still hear exactly what she would say to make me feel better. When someone does something dumb, I can practically see her face finding mine so that we can quietly laugh about it. The other day I was watching a TV show and thought, “Oh god, I bet my mom HATED this show. I would love to have heard what she had to say about it”, but then remembered she had passed away before it even began airing. I mess up my timelines and forget what she was here for and what she wasn’t because sometimes it really does feel like I talked to her yesterday.

Those moments help balance the moments of realization I have that never, NEVER will I see her alive again. Not ever, no matter how long I wait.

Those are toughies.

So today is her birthday. It would have been her 50th. We’re all going to take a sauna in an hour, something she loved to do. We’re going to stay in there as long as we can and then run and jump in the lake. When we tire of that, we’ll come back to her parents’ cabin on Lake May and have a dinner of her favorite foods in the house that she loved. My Uncle Dave may or may not put in his fake hillbilly teeth and mess with people at some point. My Grandpa will surely tell stories about when my mom was a kid; a third of them true, a third exaggerated, and a third completely made-up on the spot.

It’s probably the same night that would be happening if she were alive. And I like that.

Yikes. Today’s a sad one.

Reason #354:

Last year when I went to Minnesota (and my mom couldn’t make it at the last minute because she was too sick), she called me on my first night there to say hello.

As I was talking to her, I saw my Uncle David walk up the drive and I told her. She immediately asked, “Does he have his gross teeth in?”.

She was referring to those fake, messed-up teeth you can buy in novelty shops for pranks and such, and yes, he was wearing them. Every time any of us would go back to Minnesota and bring friends, my Uncle Dave (and sometimes Danny) would make a grand entrance as some confusing, backwoods lunatic. Last summer the costume also involved a jumpsuit, a weed-wacker, and a fake arm. Oh, and last year’s teeth had braces on them.

I loved that my mom instantly knew Dave would be in some insane get-up. There’s video from her 40th birthday of her and her friends being messed with by my him in those teeth; he’s singing some weird song, and just generally being ridiculous to confuse her friends. I love watching the tape of that night. She’s just laughing and laughing.

She was never the performer in her family, but she was a good sport around her brothers who were constantly pulling pranks and messing with people. I think they were more the class clowns and she was the one in the family who would sit to the side a little more shy, but then drop a one-liner or recap what just happened in a way that would make the entire room laugh.

Reason #353:

I’m out on the lake right now with my cousins, and they are so tan that they are no longer technically caucasian. When I asked them what exactly was happening with their bodies, they told me that they are following the “Joanne Tanning Method”.

Apparently when my mom was a teenager, she would get the perfect tan by laying on strips of tin foil, covering herself in baby oil, wearing a neon bathing suit, and soaking her hair in lemon juice.

Terrifying.

Reason #352:

I took a picture of this picture on my Aunt Beth’s fridge just now. The magnets holding it up say “TML”, short for Ten Mile Lake. I’m on Ten Mile right now, the lake in Minnesota where my mom spent her summer growing up. I’m here for a week staying with family and even though I have the occasional moment of complete, overwhelming sadness because I feel like my mom must just be around the corner somewhere - only she’s not - it’s comforting to be here. It’s nice to see my mom in her family’s faces and mannerisms and stories of that one summer when.

Today there was a 4th of July boat parade at 9am. (I thought the 9am part was a prank, but apparently it wasn’t.) Our boat got a score of 9.7, so needless to say, I was in a pretty solid boat. During the parade, we got to talking about 4th of Julys past, and we remembered that when I was younger and we would come back to Minnesota as a family for the 4th, my mom would always get roped into making the entire parade float practically by herself. Back then, it was just a regular parade - not on boats - and my family always had a float in the parade because they owned the main restaurant and hotel in town (Jimmy’s and the AmericInn, respectively). But my family never bothered to actually make their float, so when my mom got into town,  they’d say, “Joanne, we figured you’d be good at doing this”, and even though she didn’t really want to put together a float on vacation, she would.

And she’d do it well, because she was creative and a perfectionist.

And you could count on her.

Reason #351:

I love learning things about my mom. Surprising, weird little things about her, from her childhood or before she was my mother.

Like the time she was in high school and swam across the entire, gigantic lake her family lived on. Her parents sat on the shore going, “Is that Joanne? What the hell is she doing?!?”.

She was swimming across an entire lake. And do you know why? Because someone offered her a free pizza if she did.