A special Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is a special occasion. We celebrate the women who brought us into this world, the wives who gave us children and daughters who gave us grandchildren.

It carries a little more meaning this year, because my mom spent 11 days in the hospital between April 25 and May 7 battling a serious illness. There were times when we wondered if we had celebrated the last Mother’s Day with her – the reason why there have been no new posts to this site until now.

It’s during times like these that your mind races, flooded with memories, while simultaneously pondering life without your mom. It’s a sobering slap of reality when an emergency room nurse asks, “If her heart stops now, do we try to resuscitate her?”

Fortunately, that decision never had to be made.

I’m the first-born and only son. In my mom’s eyes I have always been about as perfect as a human can be, although anyone who knows me realizes this is not remotely true. I’m sure she’s aware of some of my flaws, but moms are about providing unconditional love and support, not about pointing out blemishes.

My mom taught me how to play the piano, patched the knees of my pants when they were torn, treated cuts and bruises, cheered at all my ballgames – although she often times looked away when I was on the football field because she just knew I was going to get hurt.

(She was right. I broke my left arm in seventh grade. Fortunately, it happened during practice and she wasn’t there to witness it.)

She always stressed being a good person, the best student/husband/father I could be and a gentleman. She proudly told all of her friends in Texas, where they lived for 30 years before moving to Quincy 12 years ago, about my accomplishments as a newspaperman here.

I can only remember her physically disciplining me once, although I’m sure there were others. Small in stature and rarely raising her voice, when I crossed the line too much, she would calmly utter the most terrifying six words this kid could hear: “Wait until your father gets home.”

I would have rather had her make me clean the toilet with a toothbrush, take away all my baseball cards, force me to eat spinach and left dad out of it.

There are thousands of stories about my mom, but one always comes to mind because it was so out of character.

I was a pitcher in baseball and pretty good at it. Thanks to hundreds of hours working with my dad in the back yard, I developed superb control of the baseball. When my dad called for a pitch high and tight, it went high and tight. When he wanted it low and away, it was low and away. A curve curved and a sinker sank.

One day when I was 10 or 11, a neighbor came to our house, confronted my mom and accused me of throwing rocks at her front window. Now, my mom is soft-spoken and not the least bit confrontational, so I figured this was going to be another one of those dreaded “wait-until-your-father-gets-home” moments.

“If Donnie had been throwing at your window,” my mom matter-of-factly said to the neighbor, “he would have hit it.”

Wow! Who knew my mom could talk smack before talking smack was a thing? That’s having your son’s back with an exclamation point.

My mom was discharged from the hospital Friday. She gets frustrated at times when words don’t come as easily as she would like, needs a walker to get around the house and worries way too much. She’s 87 and there’s some physical and occupational therapy in her immediate future, and enough pills to stock a small pharmacy.

On this Mother’s Day, as we sat in her living room talking about how some of her great-grandchildren were doing in school, she suddenly remembered a story of when I went to first grade.

“You came home so mad after the first week,” she said, “because you hadn’t learned how to read yet. You thought you were going to school to learn how to read and here it had been a week and you still didn’t know how. You would sit down with the newspaper and pick out the words you knew, but you wanted to be able to read.”

Moms remember things like that. And you smile.

It’s a reminder to celebrate them while you have more than just memories to cherish.