A Tribute To My Mom While She’s Still Alive

No kidding. Most people write tributes for their loved ones when they have a foot in the grave, are dearly departed or just won an honor. The good news is, my mom just won an honor (French Legion d’honneur – yay mom!) but that’s not the reason I want to write this tribute while she’s still alive. I want to write the things I never tell her because she’s super far away and I rarely see her. Skype is nice but it doesn’t convey everything and sometimes I wish she were here but she isn’t. She’s also a great grandma (not great-grandma) for my girls and present in our daily conversations. Since my mom is in reasonably good shape all things considered, I think she should know what makes her special so she sticks with her diet and stays with us longer. Tribute to the living!

Here are some of the  reasons why my mom rocks:

1. My mom knows much more about car mechanics than you’d suspect by looking at her in her classy outfits. She can tell you about the frame of an antique car, show you how the car engine is built and how to change the oil – though she’d probably send my brother down there. Her dad was a car-maniac and my older brother almost became a mechanic so I guess that explains a lot.
2. My mom loves luxury hotels but she’d give up all hope for a good night’s sleep just to see her children. When my brother was doing army time in rural Thailand, she visited him. He stayed at a rustic studio on a college campus. There was nowhere for her to sleep and the heat was stifling – no air conditioning but a tiny fan. We have a memorable picture of mom sleeping on the floor of my brother’s studio, her face literally inches from a full-on blowing fan, her body in the Superman position.
3. My mom is the best cook I know and she learned it all from her grand-mother. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I have recipes to prove it.
4. My mom can knit woolen dolls for my girls and when one of my girls’ friends gave her the puppy look, she promised to knit one for her too. We went to ImagiKnit to buy the yarn, carefully selecting hair and body colors. It took her a year but at her next trip in San Francisco, the little girl got her own woolen doll.
5. My mom has a great sense of humor, sometimes despite herself. One Christmas I offered her a bar of soap scented with Christmas spices. It was dark, rectangular and smelled like a plum pudding. She thought it was an “aged” fruit cake, stored it in the fridge and saved for a February dinner when in front of my staring brother, she religiously ate two slices before announcing it was too hard. Still – she has a great sense of humor.
6. My mom loves mice. I love mice too. My girls love mice. We love mice.
7. My mom loves The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hedwig and The Angry Inch, Downton Abbey, the Star Wars sixology, The Little Shop of Horrors,Barry Lyndon, Losey’s Don Giovanni, Jose Van Dam’s The Music Teacher, drag queens and any Indiana Jones or Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Her dad was an opera and ballet set and costume designer. Take any movie with awesome sets, costumes, dance and music, however extravagant or absurd, and it’s a sure bet she’ll ask you for the DVD next Christmas. Oh, she likes Disneyland too.
8. My mom loves tea salons. I suspect it’s the ritual more than anything since she can’t eat the sandwiches or the scones. In fact, she loves to took us out for tea time. There, that’s what she likes. Making others happy over a pot of tea and a tray of sweets.
9. My mom doesn’t love spas if she does’t have a friend or daughter to go with her. She gets bored. So do I and I’m ticklish during massages. Therefore she doesn’t go a lot to spas. That’s all right with me, it’s not my thing.
10. My mom has a caper slicer. Or at least if it existed, she’d have one. Such a kitchen gadget freak she is!!
11. My mom doesn’t mind dressing up the witch part every Halloween just for my girls’ sake. She’d make a pretty good witch if she stopped smiling on all Halloween family photos. Mom, there’s no such thing as a happy witch!
12. My mom believes in fairies more than my girls do.
13. My mom has tons of books that she never reads because 1) they were given to her by an esteemed friend but they’re super top tedious so she falls asleep reading them and doesn’t want to disappoint so she persists, 2) she loses track of them as soon as she unpacks them from her suitcase. Don’t offer her any books.
14. My mom hates to play board games but she’ll reluctantly give it a try with my girls – for 10 minutes, not more.
15. My mom gets incredibly enthusiastic for the smallest things. Even for the lost tooth of my 6-year old.

I could go on and on but I’d like to know about other people’s moms: what makes your mom special?

To my mom I want to say: Happy Mother’s Day maman!