The woman behind the blogger

Last night after class a co-worker asked if I wanted to go with her to a drop-in Rally-O class at another training center. I was all for it - since I've been slacking in actually working with my own dogs - until she mentioned that it was on Sunday evening. I declined as it is Mother's Day on Sunday. That was when it hit me.

It's Mother's Day on Sunday.

It's almost Mother's Day already?

Wow, that snuck up on me. Yeah, I've seen all the commercials and read a lot of blog posts about Mother's Day - I even wrote a Mother's Day post of my own for the Blog Exchange - but the actual day always seemed to be coming up. A way's away. Soon, but not now. Well now is almost here.

(There's a hint for you, Mr. C., you've still got a couple of days left until the big day. Don't blow it. You remember last year, don't you?)

I've decided that in honor of Mother's Day, the day we celebrate those women who bravely pushed a living being out of their girly parts and those who spent much time and effort adopting a child, here at Chicky Chicky Baby the rest of this week is all about Moms.

(Which is much better than me talking about my phlegm, don't you think? I will refrain from writing about the loogies I can hock up at whim, their consistency and color. You're welcome.)

I was recently tagged for a "10 things about me" meme by the suspiciously happy Smiling Mom (Seriously, lady, why are you always smiling? What's the secret?) and rather than talk about myself again I'm going to tell you 10 things that I think you should know about my mom.

Why should you care about my mom? First off, if you have to ask that than you can just go now. Seriously. How rude. But second, she was a woman that people just wanted to know and since she's not here with us this is my way of introducing you to the woman who I called Mom.

10 things about Grammy Chicky

1. I'm ashamed to say (ooh, there's a good place to start) that I didn't always call her "Mom". During my teen years, when my Mom and I hated each other, my best friend and I came up with a nickname for my mother. The rather cumbersome moniker "Creature with the Fangs".

We were so witty.

The name was eventually shortened to just "Fang". My friend and I thought ourselves not only terribly witty but also horribly clever for keeping this from her. Of course, my Mom (Fang) knew but she never said anything. Until years later when I was in my 20s, and we were on speaking terms again, and she let it slip that she knew. And she smirked when she said that she knew. It must of hurt a bit, hearing her first born call her names, yet she still found the stupid humor in a couple of 15 year olds trying to pull a fast one over on her and failing miserably. I can respect a woman who can laugh at her child being a dumbass.

2. She loved to dance. The woman was a dancing fiend. She wasn't particularly good at it but she was infectious. If she was dancing then you wanted to dance with her. Unless you were a sullen 15 year old, calling her stupid nicknames, and embarrassed by her exuberance.

At one of my uncles' weddings my mother was on the dance floor surrounded by people all of them doing the Twist. She was so busy giving that dance her all that she didn't notice that she had Twisted herself right out of her slip. When she did notice she just stepped out of it, kicked it to the side and kept on dancing with all of her family cheering her on. She didn't have time to be embarrassed, there was dancing to be done. It's been almost 20 years and that story still gets brought up at family get-togethers.

3. Mom had just turned 20 when she had me. She was just about to turn 24 when she had my sister. When I asked her why she had us so young Mom told me that the only thing she had ever wanted to be growing up was a mother so as soon as she could she started a family, and that simple fact used to bug the hell out of me. A mother? Just a mother? No other, greater, aspirations? A year or two before she died, after spending almost two decades working as a secretary for a Catholic elementary school, she told us that now that her children were grown she really wished she could have been a teacher. I think she would have been a great teacher, but at the risk of sounding cheesy and selfish, there's a part of me that's glad we didn't have to share her.

4. She was obsessive, almost anal, about keeping a clean house and she was not an animal lover. In this way I am my father's daughter.

5. Mom wasn't the type of person who was quick with a dirty joke, though I suspect she secretly liked them as much as the next guy, but she had a streak of gallows humor in her. She always said when she died she wanted to be buried upside down. So every who came to visit her grave could kiss her ass.

6. "Sun worshiper" isn't a strong enough term to attribute to my Mom. As soon as the weather got warm enough you would find Mom floating on a raft in the pool or lying in a deck chair soaking up the sun. By the end of the summer, thanks to her Portuguese heritage, she'd be as brown as a nut. Also in this way I am my father's daughter. Damn English genes.

7. Mom had a gap between her front teeth that was never fixed. Since she was one of eleven children there wasn't the money for dental work and she was sometimes ashamed of it. Not that it took away from her beauty. But, consequently, she didn't smile that much in pictures. But when she smiled, either in real life or in front of the camera, you felt like she had just given you a gift.

And if you feel like I'm falling into a pit of cheese let me just tell you that when she wasn't smiling she sometimes looked like she was about to bite your head off. In this way I am my mother's daughter.

8. After a long, unsatisfying marriage that ended badly (and that's all I'm going to say about my parent's relationship) my mother - a huge Red Sox fan - finally met her soul mate, a wonderful man who just happened to be a Yankees fan. Ain't that a kick in the head? At her funeral he gave the most beautiful speech and in this speech he mentioned how that year - 2004 - should be the year that the Red Sox would finally win the World Series. And I think he was genuinely pleased when they did. Now that's love.

9. Whenever he wrote her a note or gave her a card, my Mom's boyfriend would end it with the words "Here, There and Everywhere". I can't listen to that song without crying.



10. She wasn't the best mother, she wasn't the worst mother. She messed up a lot and I didn't make things easy on her. But she would have been the best grandmother ever.


It's sort of hard to wrap up a meme like this one gracefully so I'm just going to move on to the tags. I'm tagging Redneck Mommy, Sarah, and Lawyer Mama.