Opinion

Gallery: Mother's Day essays

'Joey got an earring, Mom. Can I get one, too?" my firstborn asked at age 6. 
Trying not to sound judgmental, I said, "That's a pretty grown-up thing for a first-grader. Do you know how they do that?" 
Jason shook his head. 
"They take a needle," I said, gesturing with my two index fingers about eight inches apart. 
"Ohhh," Jason said, his wide eyes on my extended fingers. "Maybe I'll wait until middle school." 
"OK," I said, glad it was that easy. 
"Mom, do you promise I can have an earring in when I get to middle school?" 
"Absolutely," I said, and didn't give it another thought. 
That was 1995. Five years later, Jason and I were having our "day together." Each year, I would spend one entire day with each of the kids and let them choose what they wanted to do. The year before, Jason and I went to Yankee Stadium. We wore Yankees jerseys and baseball caps. We sat in the sunshine, inhaling the delectable smell of stadium hot dogs while eating Carvel ice cream out of miniature baseball helmets. I couldn't wait to hear what he wanted to do this year. 
"Let's go to the Broadway Mall," he said. 
"OK," I said, trying not to show my disappointment. I'd rather get my teeth cleaned than go shopping. 
My loquacious son was unusually quiet. Would this be the new normal now that he was in middle school? The thought put a lump in my throat. 
After visiting the mall in Hicksville, we stopped at Carvel. I watched my 11-year-old as he held the cone and licked the vanilla ice cream, amazed at how much one can love a child. 
I felt, as I had all day, something wedged between us. I couldn't identify what it was. I didn't ask because I didn't want to risk making him uncomfortable and perhaps even more distant. I blinked away the tears. 
"Mom, can I tell you something?" 
"Of course, Love," I said, turning toward him. 
"Remember when you promised I could get my ear pierced when I got to middle school?" 
"Of course, I remember," I said. 
"I really wanted to get my ear pierced today." 
Relieved this was what had caused his silence, I said, "Why didn't you say something?" 
"I was afraid you wouldn't remember." 
"Do you want to go back to the mall now?" 
"You would take me back to get my ear pierced?" he asked incredulously. 
"A promise is a promise," I said. 
Afterward, we took pictures in a photo booth with him grinning broadly, pointing to the cubic zirconium stud in his ear, and me looking shocked in the background. 
I wasn't thrilled with the idea of my sixth-grader having a pierced ear. I knew some people would view it as trashy, but demonstrating to my son that I would always keep my word was what was most important to me. 
The earring had to be removed for baseball and ice hockey. League rules. Jason soon tired of putting it in and taking it out, and cleaning the piercing with alcohol and bacitracin ointment. 
He eventually stopped wearing the earring, but I hope his memory of the promise kept will last a lifetime.

Commentary

OPMAN10

Expressway: Mom grits her teeth and keeps a promise

ManiscalcoPhoto

While I'd love to look back on a cherished silk blouse still smelling of my mother's favorite perfume, and give pieces of her most precious jewelry to my daughters, I can't. Memory hands me a past barren of her possessions but filled with recollections of fruitless hours trying to convince her she earned . . . deserved . . . so much more than she allowed herself. She regarded most material things as luxuries to be shunned, as if they reflected character weakness, or worse, waste. It's taken 25 years to understand exactly what she passed down to me. 
 Two bottles, forever in the medicine chest, were her sole concessions to female vanity. The fourth Friday night of every month, regardless of the 12-hour day she worked in my father's Brooklyn cleaning store, found her slipping on way-too-big yellow rubber gloves and painstakingly applying Clairol No. 43, Sun Bronze, to her hair. She would do that all her life, no matter how many times my sister and I begged her to have her hair colored professionally. 
 The other bottle, a large-sized <a href="/topics//Olay">Oil of Olay</a>, completed my mother's beauty regimen. While anyone would swear the bottle was empty, she could eke out three more applications. I sighed at her frugality then, yet I'd hate to show anyone the condition of my toothpaste or my moisturizer before it lands in the <a href="/topics//Garbage_(band)">garbage</a> now. 
 My daughters, now adults, are appalled that the products in my makeup drawer are the same ones I've used since last century. 
 "What's wrong with brand loyalty?" I ask. 
 "Go check out <a href="/topics//Sephora_(brand)">Sephora</a> in the Americana shopping center," they plead, hardly believing I'm not curious about that bastion of beauty products in Manhasset, less than a mile from my home. 
 I do get manicures and have my hair professionally colored, but not until both are obviously overdue. 
 I recently cleaned out the hall closet and found my mother's pocketbook, the one I took home from North Shore Hospital the day she died. It contained a wallet that didn't close properly because it was crammed with too many photos, a small mirror, a <a href="/topics//Bed_Bath_&amp;_Beyond_Inc.">Bed Bath &amp; Beyond</a> coupon, lipstick about ready to be scooped out with a fingernail, a packet of tissues, and a pad and a pen -- almost cloning what inhabited my own bag (minus <a href="/topics//Cellular_Phones">cellphone</a>) that day. 
 Looking through her things reminded me of the long-ago afternoon I cleaned out her night table before her house in Brooklyn was sold. I found years' worth of <a href="/topics//Mother's_Day">Mother's Day</a> cards, a dozen unread magazine articles, reading glasses whose prescription had long since expired. Every item eerily had its twin in own my night table. 
 I look down at my mother's wedding band, complete with its original 65-year-old-guard. "Why bother to have it sized?" she used to say. "It feels just fine." The ring has a second lifetime, sitting snugly around my finger. 
 &nbsp; 
 I fight the urge to use a tea bag more than once. I use Brillo and "<a href="/topics//Elbow_(musician)">elbow</a> grease" to clean up after dinner, when both are overkill. I struggle to stop myself from saving plastic containers, rubber bands and shopping bags I couldn't use in two lifetimes. 
 It's a losing battle. Like the birthmark my mother and I share on the inside of our wrists, and the perhaps too passionate emotions we harbor for those we love, what I inherited from my mom, for better or worse, belongs to me forever.

OPBYA11

Expressway: The many ways mother lives on -- in me

Make Up

My mother has lifted me up through life -- to see heroes, stars, history and the world. 
 On March 1, 1962, my mother, Lila <a href="/topics//Martin_Smith">Martin Smith</a>, took me and the rest of the family to Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade. 
 Traveling from <a href="/topics//Baldwin,_NY">Baldwin</a> to Brooklyn to Staten Island and finally to Manhattan by ferry, we joined throngs on the streets of New York City to give a hero's welcome to our astronaut, <a href="/topics//John_Glenn">John Glenn</a>! 
 We were a nation on the cusp of a new frontier, space. The men and women who were the visionaries of this frontier had endured <a href="/topics//The_Great_Depression">the Great Depression</a> and a world war. They had done without, and learned to live with rationing and loss. They built and rebuilt this nation. They were ready to lift their children onto their shoulders and say, "See! See our future!" 
 I was one of those children. I was allowed to skip school to celebrate the first man to orbit the <a href="/topics//Earth_(planet)">Earth</a>. Never did I feel as awed by the majesty of Manhattan as on that day. 
 A few years later, in 1965, my mom and I waited at the crest of the hill at Brookside Elementary School in <a href="/topics//Baldwin,_NY">Baldwin</a> in the wee hours of a dawning day to see the Ikeya Seki comet, whose tail swept across the dawning sky. 
 We waited with bated breath for the comet's tail to light up our sky, but a fog rolled in on puffy lavender clouds and obscured our view. Nevertheless, I will never forget waiting, my mother and me, wrapped in blankets at the crest of the hill, to be amazed by our universe. 
 My mother taught her children -- Susan, Leslie, Gary and me -- everything she loved, from learning Broadway musical scores to quietly watching a sunset at Point Lookout. 
 She taught me how to walk, and how to dance. 
 She taught me how to dive into a wave at Jones Beach and held me as the swell lifted us. 
 She taught me how to float and how to look across the vast ocean at the curvature of the planet, knowing there will always be a dawn. 
 "Lift me up!" I said. "And let me see!" 
 And my mother lifted me on the shoulders of her love, she the visionary of bright futures, and I the child. 
 And on this <a href="/topics//Mother's_Day">Mother's Day</a>, and her 90th birthday on May 20, I thank her -- and can only hope I have done the same for my children. 
 Reader Dana Lynn Zotter lives in Holbrook.

OPZOTTER

Expressway: A mother who lifted us up!

Lila Martin Smith

I've arranged to come see my mother for the first time in 10 years, but the doorbell is going unanswered. She's unable to hear the bell because spinal <a href="/topics//Meningitis">meningitis</a> in infancy left her profoundly deaf. But the signal is being translated into lights flashing throughout her home. 
 It's a Saturday morning in April 2009, the sky blue, the sun bright. The birds surrounding her second-floor garden apartment in the northern <a href="/topics//New_Jersey">New Jersey</a> suburb where I grew up are chirping away as if in a <a href="/topics//Disney_Channel">Disney</a> movie. I again press the button for the bell, only harder, but still nothing. The front door remains closed. 
 Ten years we've gone without our seeing each other. Maybe she's confused the date, I suspect, or simply decided to stand me up. 
 But no. The front door opens, and there stands my mother, now 80. She's shorter than before, her hair all white, but still beautiful. We smile and say hello and hug. "You look good," I say. She reads my lips, as always. "You, too," she says. "My handsome son." 
 We go up the carpeted steps to her living room and sit on a sofa facing each other. I mention how I waited a while for her to come down. Oh, the doorbell is broken, my mother explains. Perfect, I think. Ten years we go incommunicado on each other and, on the cusp of reconnecting, the doorbell comes unwired. 
 I'd stopped calling her 10 years earlier because of a mutual falling out, and she'd stopped calling me, too. I'd decided enough was enough, and she'd apparently decided the same. We had no contact -- no visits, no letters, no messages delivered through third parties, much less a final confrontation. 
 We lost track of each other, too. I had no idea even whether she was still alive, and vice versa. Still, I never stopped wondering about her, about how she was doing and whether she ever thought about me. Almost every day I questioned my decision to cut myself off from her. Was it right or wrong? Did it help or hurt? 
 We fill each other in on our lives over the last 10 years, trying to catch up. Our conversation sticks to the basics: health, job, other family members. In a little while, we walk to a nearby diner and order lunch. There, in a booth under a skylight, near train tracks that fascinated me as a boy, I try to explain my sudden change of heart. 
 A few weeks earlier, I'd emailed my mother out of the blue. "I miss you," I wrote. "May we get together?" In a few days, she replied, "I need more time." 
 So it goes, I thought. Some time passed and I emailed her again. "We should see each other before it's too late," I wrote. "Enough is enough." 
 She agreed, and we scheduled a reunion. 
 "I came today so we could see each other -- nothing more, nothing less," I say at the diner. "And now we're sitting here, face to face, together again. That's all I care about. Nothing else matters." 
 "OK," my mother says. She pauses and reaches out across the table to pat my hand. "OK," she says again, louder now, nodding her head up and down. 
 It was all going according to plan. We were going to leave everything unspoken. All of it. It would be as if nothing bad had ever happened between us 10 years earlier, nor an estrangement that would last one-eighth of her life and almost one-sixth of mine. We would avoid the usual raised voices and finger-pointing and tears of apology and absolution. We were reconciled now, mother and son again. All would be forgotten and perhaps even forgiven. We would start fresh. 
 Except that my plan soon fell apart. 
 During another lunch at the diner about a month later, after we talk some more, my mother poses the question I most dread. 
 "Why did you stop calling me?" she asks. "What did I do wrong?" 
 I look at her without a word, my lips pressed tightly together, my breath caught in my throat. I might have known an attempt to make amends after a decade of alienation would never come so easy. A clean getaway was going to be impossible. 
 "Please tell me," she pleads. 
 "Are you sure you want to know?" I ask. "Yes," she answers. 
 I'd had my reasons for breaking away, of course. I'd had 10 years to catalog every one, examining it, testing its legitimacy, justifying its existence. 
 "All right," I say. "I'll tell you. But next time. Next time I'll tell you everything." 
 And the next time we see each other, a few weeks later, I make good on my promise. I tell my mother everything. 
 So might we all. 
 Bob Brody, an executive and essayist in Forest Hills, blogs at letterstomykids.org.

OPBRODY

Expressway: With Mom, the doorbell rings twice

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My mother shoved the manuscript into my hands soon after I put my bag away. I was out from the city for the weekend to visit my parents in <a href="/topics//Holbrook,_NY">Holbrook</a>, and she insisted that I critique a short story she told me a co-worker had written. 
 My mother, Kitty Sarluca, trusted my judgment because I’d been a reporter for Suffolk <a href="/topics//Life_(show)">Life</a> newspapers and, for the previous 10 years, I’d worked as a managing editor at one of the big New York City publishing houses. 
 I planted myself in a living room chair near the door that led to the patio and read the piece while my parents drank coffee in the kitchen. The five-page story had been typed single-spaced on cream colored paper, with wide margins on all sides. 
 “Tell them not to quit their day job,” I called out to my mother when I was done, confident in my ability to judge good writing. Certainly I felt superior to some dowdy, middle-aged woman who worked with my mother at the Smith Haven Mall Macy’s. 
 “What’s the matter with it?” my mother asked, poking her head into the living room. 
 “There are too many characters to keep track of, the pacing is off, and the way the people reacted seems a little far-fetched to me.” 
 “But it’s all true,” my mother said, her voice rising. “It really happened that way!” 
 She stormed back into the kitchen. 
 Oh no, I realized. She wrote it. 
 How could I be so stupid? Why did I even say that to her? I’d read worse pieces in some of the writing workshops I’d taken over the years and had never said anything as glib and mean to a classmate. But in a workshop you had to face the author. Dismissing someone’s effort with a sarcastic comment was much easier under the cloak of anonymity. 
 Like most children, I had a self-involved myopia when it came to my mother. To me she wasn’t a fully formed person with unfulfilled hopes and dreams, she was just Mom. It seemed natural that her universe revolved around our family. Deep down I must have known she aspired to more in life than being a parent and a shipping clerk, but it wasn’t something she ever talked about. 
 Many things were left unspoken in our house. My brother, my sister and I felt safe and knew we were loved even though my family didn’t talk a lot about our feelings. My mother wasn’t cold or uninterested in our lives. But she came from a damaged family, with an alcoholic father and a distant mother, and armor-clad emotions were her birthright. 
 I almost followed my mother into the kitchen to apologize for being such a jerk, but decided that would make it worse. Pretending that I still thought the story was written by a friend might spare both of us additional hurt and humiliation. I’d been taught that uncomfortable feelings were easier to deal with when kept to myself. That these feelings eventually escape at twice the intensity was something I’d yet to learn. 
 Several years later, after my mother’s death, I helped my father go through her things. Not only had she saved all the birthday, anniversary, and Mother’s Day cards I’d ever given her, tucked into a box in a closet were copies of everything I’d published since high school. There was no sign that my mother had ever tried to write again. 
 Writer Dan Sarluca lives in Manhattan.

Expressway: From Mom, a lesson that words can hurt

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