Move Over, Rachael Ray

Mom, in her twenties.

This is a love story.

I'm not writing it just because it's Valentine's Day. I'm writing it for my mother, because she died on Valentine's Day, just four years ago.

My mother wasn't the kind of parent I could go to with a problem, or have deep talks with. But she was the loving mom who stayed up all night with me when I was in junior high as I suffered through writing a paper (a thought that has amazed me throughout my communications career, when the words cannot leave my mind and my fingertips quickly enough). She was the mom who read voraciously and passed that on to me - another career builder. And she was the faithful, affectionate and uncomplaining healer who was tireless with five kids through earaches and messy stomach flus and general ailments.

She was the mother who lost her only son - my funny, smart, handsome brother Pat - in a drowning accident when he was only 21, and somehow she and my father did not stop living. They kept raising me and my sisters through the grief and loved us all the way up to adulthood, and into caring and productive women.

She was also the mom who, in my fuzzy memory, had at least one nervous breakdown during my childhood, and who'd been given electroshock therapy after my youngest sister was born, when it was still too new to know enough about it. And who, as a result, would lose patches of time, so that sometimes we'd arrive home from school in the afternoon to find her still in her robe at the dining room table with a cup of now-cold coffee; almost as if she had not moved since we left for the bus earlier that day.

She was fun and funny - from her, we learned the "sheet dance" when we were folding clothes. She had us put on "whoopee socks" to polish our wood floors with bright orange Johnson's wax while we perfected our skating technique. She was one of the first people I knew of to go into the Hair Cuttery when it debuted in the early '70s and ask for a "haircut and a blow job," innocently not knowing what she was saying. Then there was the day she sadly told her friends her eye doctor diagnosed her with gonorrhea (when she really meant glaucoma).  And once when I came home from high school to run lines with Tommy Wheatley, with whom I was "starring" in Bye Bye Birdie, she ran into the kitchen to make him a banana cream pie because she wanted him to stick around and be my boyfriend. (He never was, but we were pretty good friends. Banana cream pie or not.)

She was easy to love some days, tougher on others. She gave me a run for my money when she was old and ill, but in those last few months, when Alzheimer's was added to her dementia, she stopped being angry about her stay in the nursing home and just smiled and adored me when I was with her. One day, when we were watching TV (she loved the Food Network), she turned to me and said with a sigh, "I wish Rachael Ray was my daughter." I, who was spending all my spare time with her, was pretty jealous of Rachael Ray, who as far as I knew had never visited my mother once.

My sisters and I stayed up with Mom the night before she died on a Saturday - Valentine's Day 2009. It was a day that is forever changed for us, that will always be, first, the day she passed, before we think of flowers and candy and cards.

After she died, I found a letter she wrote to her sister but never mailed. She was about the same age as I am now, and she wrote about feeling hurt and out of sorts because all of us kids had moved on, and she didn't know what to do with herself. It breaks my heart - my Valentine's Day heart - that I wasn't wiser at a younger age about what's really important, that I didn't take more time back then to make her happy, to give her what every parent wants: not gifts, but more time with their children.

Still, I know that I did right by my mother, and loved her imperfectly but well. I know that she knows that. And even though I'm not Rachael Ray, I think my mom was pretty glad to have me as one of her girls. Happy Valentine's Day, Mom.

©2013 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie