Reasons I Love My Mother

Reason #346:

Today I got to thinking about birthdays because 1-800-FLOWERS thought it would be sweet to remind me that my mother’s 50th is in less than two weeks and that I “don’t want to forget it!”.

Don’t worry, 1-800-FLOWERS, no chance of that!

My mother gave us children great birthdays when we were younger. She and my dad would always say that birthdays should be big and Christmases should be small because Christmas was not about us, but then they never followed through on that.

Anyway, my birthdays growing up were wonderful. My sister Janelle and I have birthdays that are two days apart, which could have turned ugly, but never did. When we were really young, we had joint parties, but as we got older, my parents learned that was no longer gonna fly and they started splitting them up.

I have memories of tons of fun days my parents planned for me. There was the all-day trip to Great America, the Laser Tag birthday, and my favorite all these years later: the Jurassic Park themed-birthday. I was obsessed with Jurassic Park as a child and often pretended I was Joseph Mazzello in the first movie. (Did I write Steven Spielberg a letter asking to be in the second one? Don’t worry about it.) Anyway, when I was eight, I had a Jurassic Park themed pool party which made sense to me at the time but seems confusing now, and my mom told everyone to bring me dinosaur-related gifts. Then they did. And then I was in heaven.

My mom made every birthday special, even well into our adult lives. And I really wish she was going to be here so that we could have made her 50th special for her. It would have been an incredibly fun party. She probably would have shot down a dinosaur theme, but I would have figured something else out.