"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. *n at 82, and 3000 miles away on the long distance line, she knew what i meant: soupy mashed1 potatoes.
this what was she had made for *ry illness or mishap2 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 soothed3 disappointment or nourished a mild cold. this time i was seriously ill.
arriving on the midnight plane from virginia, mom looked 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. the one she received as a shower gift, with the worn wooden handle and the years of memories.
she was mashing4 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, how*r long it takes," she told me. "there is nothing * important i have to do in my life than * 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 decided5 that i would not pre-decease her. she simply would not have it. she took me on daily walks *n when i couldn't get any further than our driveway. she crushed the pills i had to take and put them in jam, because *n 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 started to fall out, she bought me cute hats. she gave me warm ginger6 ale in a crystal wineglass to calm my tummy and sat up with me on sleepless7 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 n*r 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 *ry day you are lucky enough to have a mother around to love you.
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