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1、 Mothers & Daughters“You won”t forget to bring the potato masher, will you?“ I said to my mother on the phone after telling her I had to have a mastectomy. Even at 82, and 3000 miles away on the long distance line, she knew what I meant: Soupy mashed potatoes. This what was she had made for every il
2、lness or mishap of my childhood-served in a soup bowl with a nice round spoon. But I had been lucky as a child and was rarely sick. Most often the potato medicine soothed disappointment or nourished a mild cold. This time I was seriously ill. Arriving on the midnight plane from Virginia, Mom looked
3、fresh as a daisy when she walked through the front door of my house in California the day after I came home from the hospital. I could barely keep my eyes open, but the last thing I saw before I fell asleep was Mom unzipping her carefully packed suitcase and taking out her 60-year-old potato masher.
4、 The one she received as a shower gift, with the worn wooden handle and the years of memories. She was mashing potatoes in my kitchen the day I told her tearfully that I would have to undergo chemotherapy. She put the masher down and looked me squarely in the eye. “I”ll stay with you, however long i
5、t takes,“ she told me. “There is nothing more important I have to do in my life than help you get well.“ I had always thought I was the stubborn one in my family but in the five months that followed I saw that I came by my trait honestly. Mom had decided that I would not pre-decease her. She simply
6、would not have it. She took me on daily walks even when I couldn”t get any further than our driveway. She crushed the pills I had to take and put them in jam, because even in middle-age, with a grown daughter of my own, I couldn”t swallow pills any better than when I was a child. When my hair starte
7、d to fall out, she bought me cute hats. She gave me warm ginger ale in a crystal wineglass to calm my tummy and sat up with me on sleepless nights. She served me tea in china cups. When I was down, she was up. When she was down, I must have been asleep. She never let me see it. And, in the end, I got well. I went back to my writing. I have discovered that Mother”s Day doesn”t happen some Sunday in May. But every day you are lucky enough to have a mother around to love you.
