Sweet Sixty

My mother, one of the few regular readers of this blog (as irregular as it is) turns sixty on Monday. Her birthday present, which I’m not revealing, weighs 150lbs and is being delivered on Wednesday (hint: ground dwelling primate that previously inhabited the forests of Congo). In the meantime I’d like to thank her for being such a fabulous mom and grandma.
Thirty years ago my mom had a 17-month-old and was in her final month of pregnancy with me. My father was in recovery from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, mom was completing her PhD at Berkeley (“Repudiating the Self-Justifying Fiction” – never read it but I hear it’s a page-turner), and she was about to have two girls under the age of eighteen months. In just a few weeks I will turn thirty myself, and I often wonder how my mother managed. I’ve got a single daughter, a modern, diaper-changing husband and few other responsibilities at the moment. Yet some days I congratulate myself for just having finished the grocery shopping, managed the laundry and gotten Eliza into bed without too many tears.
But my mom was never one to shirk from a challenge. She has always been a woman of many talents: able to fix broken appliances, change the oil in her car, program a computer and cook a delicious meal for almost nothing. On top of that she is a wonderful writer and a talented artist. She can hold her end of any intellectual conversation, has a lively and fun sense of humour and is one of the most honest people that I know. That honesty has intimidated a few lesser mortals, but her closest friends and family have no doubt how much they are loved by her. She is incredibly generous and self-sacrificing – sometimes to a fault – with the classic Jewish mother tendency to choose the toughest part of the chicken for herself, to only eat microwave popcorn if she is dining alone and to eschew turning on lights and read in the dark.
But while I might tease her at times, I am constantly amazed and grateful for everything she has done for me, especially now that I have become a mother myself and have a deeper sense of the sacrifices involved with raising a child. I’m so glad to see her approaching sixty with a wonderful, supportive boyfriend, a career that still enriches her and a whole slew of grandkids to look after in her old age and decrepitude.
I love you mom, happy 60th!