Mother's Day

My mother was born in Paris but to very provincial Spanish parents.  She married my father when she was 23, and he whisked her away to New Jersey to live.  Princeton, but still.  She had a lot of adjusting to do.

By the time I was born ten years later, you'd think she would have had ample time to acclimate.  But, she clung to her old-fashioned, handed- down-by- Spanish -grandmother-ways.  She  steadfastly refused to succumb to the allure of the Breck Girl... She put lemon juice on my hair to lighten it, olive oil to moisturize it, and vinegar on to detangle it.   I went to school smelling like salad.

Lunchtime was equally traumatic.   Everyone else had nice, shiny metal lunch boxes bursting with cultural relevancy and advertising.   I had a brown paper bag.   The over-sized one my mother got from the grocery store.  Wrinkled from multiple uses.

I think it was Joan Rivers who joked about an epitaph that would suit her:  “I’d rather be here than in the kitchen!” Or was her line, “If God wanted women to cook, he would have given them aluminum hands?"  Either way, my mother has lived by both of these lines her whole life, well at least for as long as I lived with her as a kid. So imagine my and my sisters’ surprise when one sunny Sunday morning, while in our early and mid-teens, we awoke to a basket of picture-perfect bran muffins. Astounding. 

We wondered what had suddenly possessed this woman whose disdain for the kitchen was evinced, for example,  by small hamburgers formed in the palm of her hand, slightly bulging in the center, tapered at the edges, and so over cooked that they would crumble into gray gri stly beef pebbles. My mom had a fondness for ketchup as the panacea for all cooking ills and one time, a favorite cousin of hers placed rolls of TUMS at every place setting before one of her holiday dinners. Her reputation preceded her.

My sister and I stared at the basket, at the plump brown muffins perched in a perfect cluster. “Should we?” we tittered. We each plucked one of the muffins from their nest and peeled off the paper wrappers. We did not want to spoil the moment, but we were dying for a taste. Tentatively, we put our lips to the muffin tops, then we took big bites. Mouths full, eyes wide, we stared at each other for a second. The shock was instant.

Twice a year, (on Mothers Day and on her birthday July 7th), my mother used to pull out her favorite phrase and say, “Attention must be paid.”

Translation? She wanted to be celebrated, and that meant The Hotel Bel Air, Sunday best, family only, no friends or ‘strangers’ pulling focus on her closeup.

Her use of the phrase drove me crazy, because of course Linda Loman’s lament was about aging and the lack of human kindness shown her salesman husband Willie, not my glamorous complicated mother on the palm-­laden patio holding court.

But champagne in hand surrounded by at least two of her children with at least two of her grandchildren in tow, she got what she needed....a toast, “ To the Queen of the Day.”

Attention had been paid. Deep down I knew what Mom meant. And she knew I knew.