A Pack of Smokes at the Pearly Gates

Mothers Day was so easy once but it's all different now. Once you could just go outside and hunt around around 'til you found  a few apple blossoms, which you jammed into the crotch of a clothespin, swaddled  in soggy Kleenex and wrapped in tinfoil, just because tinfoil was so pretty. Then you just had to set it next to your mom's place at the breakfast table where she could enjoy looking at it while she took that bracing drag on the day's first cigarette. 

That’s how it was in my house anyway, long before the time when motherhood got all soaked in Clorox and sanitized. These days a mother is  supposed to be this purring and approving presence, building SELF ESTEEM in her young every minute.I knew my mother loved me - fiercely even - but she didn’t hand out compliments just to make me feel good about myself. When I got to the finals of the big annual Spelling Bee, then told her how I'd fallen down on the word ‘tongue’ she yelled, “You misspelled ‘TONGUE’?! Can you spell ‘LIP’?"I wasn’t hurt by the remark because I understood her, in the way that the second child often 'gets' the mother. Even as an 11-year-old I got it that her life had brought her heartache and that my being the best little speller in the city might somehow ease her pain.  I liked the way she was, strong and outspoken. I even liked it that she had a temper; and I didn’t mind that she smoked in a closed car. It was good knowing how human and  flawed she was; it made me feel better about my own shortcomings. Plus she never smothered me the way parents do nowadays.I miss her a lot. But I smile every time I look at this picture, taken that night in her 59th year when she came home after a week in the hospital with a  shattered pelvis and was still facing at least another couple of weeks in bed, which is how they did it in those days, never mind teh current method of trotting you around the corridors with your IV's from the surgery clanking along beside you.Her two sisters and her brother were there in the room as I was. Also my sister Nan, even sitting on the bed with Mom. I like that too, that she's sitting on the bed. The aunts and uncles were all drinking whiskey. So was our mother, as you can see, and she had that favored pack of cigs right handy too. Ah Cal Sheehy, born Caroline Theresa Sullivan! Here's to you, you cheerful soul who raised two cheerful daughters all alone. I hope they have Camels in heaven.