mom

I am named after her. My daughter looks exactly like her.

If you give her a piece of jewelry or an item of clothing, she will always wear it when she knows she is going to see you.

She has a stuffed “Ziggy” collection, one for every holiday and for some insane reason she displays them on the huge sweeping mantle of the fireplace in her formal dining room, right next to her Royal Daulton porcelain collection. She has a vampire Ziggy, a cupid Ziggy, a leprechaun Ziggy, a Santa Ziggy, an Easter Bunny Ziggy and on and on.

She corrects all the grammatical and spelling errors in her sorority and college alumni newsletters with a red pen and mails them back. I don’t think they’ve ever responded and I’ve often wondered if they keep these corrected newsletters in a file marked “nuts." I have one of these files, by the way.

She allows others to take credit for her work, ideas, thoughtfulness, etc. Like when she and Dad give someone a really perfect gift, she won’t correct the recipient if they assume the gift came from my Dad, (like the skil saw she bought for my brother after an exhaustive research and studying of the Consumer Report magazine), and she always beams when Dad gets the accolades.

She sends Hallmark cards to her kids and grandkids for every single occasion large or small, holiday mainstream or obscure: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Sweetest Day, National Grandchildren’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day (we are not Irish), Earth Day, etc.

She has a terrific capacity for remembering obscure anniversaries and special things like my favorite flavor of tea, the date of my first date with my husband, our favorite authors, scented candles, flowers, and musicians.

She knows how to mother my husband without reminding him that his own mother is gone now. She accepts new arrivals into the family with unquestioning friendship and later, love.

When someone tells her “I love you” she smiles and says, “Thank you" (unless it’s one of her grandchildren, then she says it back with abandon).

She is the best secret-keeper in the world.

She never reminds you that you owe her money, but when you remember and pay her back, she smiles at you like she did when you were a kid and got a poor report card. Shame on you, you should know better.

She avoids confronting those she cares about directly when at all possible. Instead, she cuts an article out of a newspaper or magazine and hands it to us with a raised eyebrow. There is never a mention about it afterward. I have perfected the eyebrow move in adulthood. It's really effective.

She reads the obituary section of the paper daily and reads the ones that are under 50 aloud to my father, which drives him nuts.

She has not gotten over the death of her mother, which happened in 1979. She cries at every holiday when there is a mention of the “good old days.”

She speaks French, Italian and a little Vietnamese.

She had polio when she was 15 and spent her sophomore year of high school in the Rainbow Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, learning how to walk again.

Her mother was an industrial nurse who worked in the medical clinic of a large steel plant taking care of sick and injured steelworkers who adored her.

Her father worked as a “union-buster” for the corporate heads of a large steel plant and was hated by the steelworkers.

She types a little over one hundred words a minute but prefers to write all of her personal correspondence by hand on beautiful paper.

She keeps in touch with three of her friends from childhood. She is 69 years old, so that’s a lot of handwritten correspondence!

She could have married a rich guy, but she fell in love with a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks and married him instead. My Dad is a lucky man. It's good that he knows this.

She laughs at dirty jokes but would never tell one.

She knows how to twirl a baton.

She plays cards every other week with the same group of women she has been meeting with for over thirty years.

She never tells her daughter or daughter-in-law how to raise their kids. She always bites her tongue.

She is far smarter than her husband but never reminds him of this fact.

She is never fooled but often pretends to be in order to not hurt someone's feelings.

She is fiercely defensive of the ones she loves and holds grudges against those she believes have hurt her loved ones in any way.

She keeps a stuffed animal her high school sweetheart gave to her. He is not my father, by the way.

She used to tell me that if I could count my real true friends on one hand I should consider myself to be very, very lucky. I used to think this was such a stupid idea and that it was sad that she didn’t have as many friends as I did. Now I know what she was talking about.

She loves brussel sprouts and stays away from sweets but keeps a bag of Hershey bars stashed in her lingerie drawer.

She is the first person who told ever told me I am beautiful. This was important when I was a clutzy 13 year-old and had braces and zits and felt like the most hideous creature on the planet. And I believed her.