10 Ways to Love Your Mama

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, there’s a conversation going on about how to tell our moms we love them on Valentine’s Day.  What to give, what to tell them, etc.  “We are partial to the ways of words,” they say. So with that, I decided to have my way with words and give you some advice on what to give your mama for Valentine’s Day.

1. Tell her that in the middle of the night, sometime in the summer when you were a little girl, you woke up and walked to check in on her because she’d broken her foot in a softball game. It’s a gruesome tale and all you can do is imagine what happened because you were too young to watch the game. Tell her you saw the crutches leaning on the wall and that you probably should’ve felt sorry for her but in that moment you thought she was the coolest, most bold woman that ever lived.

2. Tell her that she bought you magic lipstick at the Clinique counter at the bottom of Water Tower in the summer of 1998, a few weeks before you started student-teaching. “It looks good on everyone,” the lady at the counter said, handing you a tube of Black Honey. “Yeah right,” you thought. You were more of a Bodyshop Kiwi Lipgloss gal, but secrectly, you really wanted that deep red color to look good on you.

Tell her it did, but you only realized it when you were walking along Michigan Avenue all by yourself holding a cup of coffee, wearing your first pair of high heels and you took a sip of coffee and the color came off on the lid and it made you so happy to be walking in the city with everyone else towards whatever it was they were all doing with their wild and precious lives.

3. Tell her thanks for making you a salad and pouring you a glass of wine and watching “Friends” with you every night that you were student teaching. Tell her it took your mind off of how hard teaching middle school was. Tell her watching Joey and Chandler, and wondering whether Ross would get back together with Rachel, and if you’d ever get your hair to look like Jennifer Aniston’s made you feel better.

4. Tell her that you love going shopping with her not just because you love shopping but because she picks out things for you to try that you would never in a million years consider.  She says, “C’mon! For Pete’s sake, take a risk!” as she hands you a pair of red cowboy boots or a pair of army green sailor pants. Tell her you know it sounds silly but going shopping with her makes you think you can be more than what you are. Like maybe you’ll be the slugger who breaks her foot sliding into first base and not the one in the dugout who gets her tooth knocked out sitting on the bench. (Also tell her thanks for buying you an electric blue dress for Prom and a wedding dress with so much tulle that you probably looked like you’d robbed a tulle factory. Those were both your decisions and she probably had other ideas, so tell her thanks for buying them anyway.)

5. Tell her that being on Drill Team was one of your favorite things in the whole world. Tell  her that when you were young, and a song with a good beat came on, you used to try and sit as still as you could and fight that feeling to dance. Tell her you could never do it so you would dance in your room, or in the basement and make your brother dance to the routines you made up (he never got the lift part right when you were re-creating the scene from “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” but he did have a mean backspin when the two of you pretended you were cast members of “Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo”). Tell her you knew what people said about Drill Teamers. You’d known it since you were in grade school. But the risk of what you might become was worth being a part of the precision and the stomping and the flying splits and reaching your hands in the air and feeling so strong and confident and wanting to scream, “I found something I’m good at!” Tell her thanks for letting you try out for Drill Team even though you think she might’ve been a little nervous about the endeavor.

6. Tell her that you loved going to the library next door to your house but that sometimes there was a mean librarian who told you and your little brother to stop fooling around. You don’t think the two of you were fooling around but maybe you were. Anyway, you felt bad and went home and when she asked you what happened you told her what the librarian said. “Who said that?” she asked. “Was it Big Buns?” You and Geoff almost fell to the floor with laughter because she did have a curiously large rear, but neither of you had said it to the other. “You could serve coffee on that thing,” your mom said, one hand on her hip and the other stirring something delicious on the stove. “Never mind her,” she said, dipping a piece of bread in whatever sauce she was making and handing it us. To this day you don’t know what that librarian’s real name is.

 

1. Give her a copy of Caps For Sale by  Esphyr Slobodkina and the DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird. Caps of Sale because you loved it when she read the story and shook her pointer finger like the man in the book did at the monkeys in the tree.  And a DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird because she showed you the movie first. It hurts your feelings when people let you know that watching the movie first was a stupid thing; that only stupid people watch the movies of books first. But you know that you’d never have read the book if you hadn’t fallen in love with the image of the story first. Maybe she knew that, too.  Tell her you’re sorry you hated to read when you were little. Tell her you like to read now. Tell her that this year two of your students told you that To Kill a Mockingbird was too hard and they were having trouble keeping up with the reading. “Watch the movie first,” you told them.  “Are you sure?” they asked.  “Absolutely. Watch the movie.” It’s an act of faith, really. Maybe of witnessing. You’ll do anything you can to show them the story, hoping that whatever glimpse of it they see latches onto their soul and grows so that they’ll have to return to it time and time again.

2. Give her a CD of Motown Hits. Make sure it has Smoky Robinson’s “Shop Around,” the Temptations “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” and “My Girl,”  and the Diamonds, “Stroll”. Tell her thanks for teaching you how to Stroll. Tell her you remember doing the dance at one of her birthday parties, people bee-bopping in a line and you and she strolling down the center. Tell her you wrote about it in graduate school and it went like this:

My mom and I went next. She and I danced towards each other and then she put up a hand to tell me she would go first. I brushed my hand towards the center to say, “Go right ahead.” She took four steps, spun around and stopped. She pointed to me and I copied her, adding my own flourishes. This is how we danced down the center: her leading, me following. Each time the dance got more complicated, by what I added. But she kept up and made each combination her own. We weren’t competing; we were taking what the other offered and molding it to ourselves. It was the perfect kind of dance.

3. Give her sunflowers seeds because she let you grow them in the backyard and one got so big you had to get on a ladder to reach its pedals. Tell her you remember the day you walked into the kitchen and she pointed to the backyard where that tall sunflower was lying on the ground. A squirrel had gotten to it. It’d bitten the stem so the flower would fall and he could eat its seeds. Tell her you remember that she explained all this to you as she stood by you. You were sad about the flower but it is this memory you think of as an example of how one tells the truth. Lovingly, honestly, and with a bit of wonder. “That damn squirrel was clever,” she said rubbing your tummy and pouring you some orange juice.

4. Give her a set of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. Because the two of you read the dust cover in the YA section of the Hammes Bookstore at Notre Dame and laughed so hard at the rules of the jeans and she said, “Oh, we have to get this.” And you decided, after she treated you to a mocha in the coffee shop, after the book was purchased, after the two of you walked past the sculpture outside of the bookstore of Mary and Elizabeth hugging for the babies growing inside them, that maybe South Bend wasn’t so bad.

If you wanted, you could show her a few pictures of her grandkids:

 

And maybe one of you: