If you can't say something nice... #WindowOvertheSink

I don’t really mind the social distancing of these strange days. I don’t mind wearing a mask when I’m going to be among others. My hair and my nails…well, they don’t look very good, and I’ll be glad to see Denee and Julie again, but they don’t actually bother me, either. I can wait until the end of the getting back to business line because no one I know bases their opinion of me on my hair and nails. Or, if they do, they probably aren’t people I need in my life. I am—sigh—of a certain age, and caution just makes sense to me. It’s not—let me say that again, NOT—the same as fear.

We haven’t run out of toilet paper. I haven’t even fought with anyone in the personal-needs aisle of a grocery store over the last four-pack, although one day I did indeed buy the last four-pack. I’m growing used to using whatever brand of facial tissue I can find, because the spots where Kleenex and Puffs live are always empty. I miss them, the Puffs and Kleenex and the Charmin toilet paper, but I miss having smooth skin, too, and I’ve learned to be perfectly happy without it.

Like that skin, I kind of doubt that life as we knew it will ever return completely. Just as every other catastrophe has affected us, so will this one. I don’t know, sadly enough, if we will learn from it or not. We aren’t even able to get the basics down. Love your neighbor. Do no harm.Tell the truth. Live and let live.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I’m going to slip something right in here that I wrote for a blog post somewhere else. You won’t even see the seams—promise!

“Being a mom has made me so tired. And so happy.” – Tina Fey

I’ve never been able to settle Mother’s Day down into that one Sunday of the year. Make no mistake, I like hearing from my kids on the actual day. If I’ve heard from all of them by day’s end, it makes the sunset of that day all the better and brighter and…I don’t know, calmer. (Which is decidedly odd, because I don’t recall ever having a calm day while they were growing up.)

The truth of the matter, though, is that most of my Mother’s Days haven’t been on the second Sunday in May. No, it’s been more like this.

Y  The days they were born. I don’t need to explain that one, do I?

Y  The days they graduated.

Y  The evenings they sat on the porch with me and watched sunsets.

Y  The mornings my sons crawled out of bed and helped me get my car unstuck from the snow so that I could go to work.

Y  The day after my mother’s passing when I told my mother-in-law that I no longer had anyone who would love me no matter what. And my mother-in-law said, “You still have me.”

Y  The day my daughter, daughters-in-law, granddaughters, and I lay on a bed in a vacation rental and laughed and talked.

Y  The days lately when my daughter has gone to the grocery store for me because, as her brother says, her dad and I are in the “high risk” group.

Y  The blissful days that have made me a grandmother seven times.

Y  Every day. Every day you’re a mom, no matter who it’s to—giving birth doesn’t have a lot to do with it—you have somebody to love who loves you back. Even on the days you don’t like each other.

I’ve reached the time when I am the matriarch (although I’m not at all crazy about that word) on our particular branch of the family tree. I still miss my mom and mother-in-law, but am so glad that I had them. They were glad to have had me, too, and that’s a nice thing to know.

Not every second Sunday in May has been a happy day, just as every day as a mother hasn’t been a happy one—I had three teenagers at one time; of course they weren’t all good days! But when I look back and count up my fortunately few regrets, being a mom is never on the list.

Wishing you a Happy Mother’s Day. All of them.

There, didn’t see a thing, did you? My life is so much better with cut-and-paste in it! I’ve thought so much about my mom lately. I cut lilacs at the farm where I grew up—they were always her favorites. And mine. I’ve thought of my mother-in-law and how much I miss her. I’m so grateful to have had them both.

And my mind keeps going back to those basics. Love your neighbor. Do no harm. Tell the truth. Live and let live. And another one, said by Thumper’s mom, If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. These are things all mothers—including rabbit ones, apparently—have been saying all along. They’re as right now as they ever were.

As we go through this time and come out on the other side of it, we need to remember those things. We need to relearn how to listen, how to embrace and mean it, and how not to do harm. We can do without Charmin, Kleenex, Puffs, and smooth skin--we can't do without kindness and all that goes with it.

Have a great week. Be safe. Be nice to somebody.

Such are the dreams... @Liz Flaherty

This was written for Mother's Day of 1991. It wasn't my last Mother's Day column, but it was my first. It's kind of nice to know I still like it, although I'm not sure I remember the original dreams--the reality was so much better. What do you think?

"She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles that weren't there yesterday..." - Chris Gantry

When she was young, before she had formula stains on her clothes or stretch marks or crows feet, your mother had dreams. In those dreams, she was a singer or dancer or writer or CEO. She wore designer clothes and her hair was always perfect and she had the kind of checkbook balance that dreams are made of. Her plans for vacation never included McDonald's or Motel 6.

For many mothers, there was a man in those dreams. He was always strong and handsome and intelligent and sensitive. He never forgot important dates, never left dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, never for one moment considered anything in life to be as important as the woman whose dreams he was inhibiting.

Sometimes there were children in the dreams, children who behaved well and wore miniature designer clothes that stayed clean. Children who ate their vegetables without complaint and did their homework without fail and who never watched tasteless television or hid dirty magazines under their beds. Even after your mother gave birth to these children (painlessly--we're dreaming here) she maintained her figure and her perfect hair and flawless skin that defied crows feet to appear.

Her home was a portrait of good taste and comfort. In her dreams its plumbing was never iffy, its windows never leaky, its floors never sloped and scarred with the passage of time. The furniture shone with the patina of quality and good wax. The beds were made each morning and the pillows arranged in the artful disarray the magazines make look easy. The house was even paid for.

It is said that dreams die hard.

Not for most of us. For most of us, they change rather than die. We wear what is comfortable and what we can afford, we have bad hair days and not-so-bad hair days, and time leaves its obvious footprints on our skin. Instead of glamorous careers, most of us have jobs we may or may not like but which help keep the checkbook balance in the black. Not the very black, maybe, but close enough to keep the wolves from the door.

The men in our lives are different from what we dreamed, as fallible and faulty as we ourselves are. Although on any given day, they will probably have some of the characteristics of the men of our dreams, chances are good they'll never have all of them at once.

Which brings us to the children of our dreams. Speaking for myself only, I must say that mine were not. If one of them happened to be behaving well, the other two probably weren't. They dressed okay, but were seldom clean at any point in time previous to their 12th birthdays, when they suddenly started taking two showers a day and setting up housekeeping in front of the bathroom mirror. They did homework spasmodically and subsisted on diets that even now the memory of makes my stomach clench. They watched, read, and listened to every single thing I ever didn't want them to.

They turned the house of my dreams into what seemed at times like a three-ring circus. There was no single day in which every bed in the house was made or every dish clean at the same time. The house has leaky windows and iffy plumbing and a few floors that would feel right at home on a ski lift. The patina on the furniture is marred by marks from compasses and baseball cleats and the rubber soles of size 12 basketball shoes.

There is nothing I would change. Nothing.

When I was young, I had dreams. Somewhere in the passage of time, those dreams underwent changes, but they all--every one of them--came true. I hope yours did, too.

Happy Mother's Day to us all, and thanks, Mom. Both of you.

My mom, Evelyn Shafer

Duane's mom, my other mom, Mary Farrell