I’m honored to be featured in a special WordPress Mother’s Day Feature on MomBlogs! Thanks WordPress and welcome new WordPress visitors!
As Cheri wrote in her lovely post, I write about life with my three daughters, my aging and heightist mom, or about things that irk or baffle me. Really, I write about whatever I want to write about, damn it.
In honor of Mother’s Day, here’s a piece I’ve written about my mother.
“LUNCH WITH TWO WOMEN NAMED JOAN”
also known as, MY 85 YEAR-OLD MOM AND HER FRIEND HAVE LUNCH, CATFIGHT ALMOST ENSUES
When she was ten, my mother met a girl who shared her first name. They quickly became best friends and stayed so for the next 75 years. Together they shared schoolyard memories, weddings, and years of family get-togethers.
But in the year and a half since my father passed away, my mom had not been able to see her best friend, Joan, because they live an hour apart and neither could drive on the freeways. (Though unfortunate for them, likely countless lives have been saved by their motoring absence.)
My brothers and sisters and I felt badly about the situation especially because this was when my mom needed her friend the most, in the lonely time that followed the loss of her husband of sixty years. So first my brother and I decided to reunite the two Joans through email.
But as much as we tried to simplify the process, our Joan could not, or rather would not, embrace the use of a computer. At each tutorial she would play along and pretend to listen to us, while refusing to let anything sink in. Though my mom would nod or respond occasionally with an “Uh-huh,” I knew she was secretly worrying if we’d finish the tedious exercise before the start of Dr. Oz. Frankly, we could have gotten more genuine cooperation from my cat.
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