Carousel

1) When I was three, she took me to the library every Friday to pick up a new set of books which she would read to me over the next week. (I’m sure she got a little tired of Eric Carle and Frog & Toad after a while, but it never showed.)

2) In 5th grade, knowing I had been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation, she picked up a full-length Trek novel at the library and handed it to me, saying, “why don’t you try this?” This was the first book I ever read from the “grownup section” — who knows when I would have ventured there on my own?

3) For my fifth birthday party, she cooked enough food for something like ~75 guests. By herself. And it was all good. And she did the exact same thing ten months later for my brother’s first birthday.

4) She took care of me (age five) and my brother (age ~three weeks) when we had chickenpox…while she also had chickenpox.

5) When I lamented last year that we had gotten rid of a couple of random action figures from 1992 (yes, really) during our moving sale, she went on eBay and bought the exact same ones.

6) When I had to catch a 6 AM bus in high school, she woke up every morning at 5 AM to make my lunch, give me breakfast, and drive me to the bus stop, even though I could, in retrospect, have done all these things myself.

7) She worked extra hours, and sometimes even Sundays, so that she could rack up enough comp time to come home early when she needed to pick up my brother or me from after-school activities (despite the fact that she worked ~50 miles away).

8) Since I got my own apartment, she has sent me a steady stream of carefully measured and written recipes, in the hope that I might finally be able to fend for myself, even though she had to perfect them through decades of hard work. I don’t think I would be interested in cooking if I couldn’t make food that tastes at least vaguely like hers.

9) She remembers even the most obscure and useless life detail I share with her, even things I don’t remember sharing! She recently embarrassed me by asking about a flight voucher I’d forgotten I had and which I therefore failed to use before it expired :-P

10) She has tolerated my BS for nearly twenty-five years and shows no signs of giving up on me :-)

Happy Mother’s Day!