Why I Love My Mom
by Katie
I love my mom because even though she found me at the end of the driveway in a paper bag, she always tells me that it’s impossible for her to love me any less. When I feel bad, she sings to me that I’m a poor little lamb who has lost my way. When I sneeze or make another unexpected noise, she asks if I feel like that all over, or just in certain places. When I say a foreign or funny-sounding word, she tells me, “If you do, you’ll clean it up.”
I love my mom because she is realistic in my expectations. When life isn’t fair, she says, “‘Tough titty,’ said the kitty, ‘but the milk’s still fresh.’” Or she tells me her favorite stories about beggars: “If wishes were horses, then beggars could ride” and “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
I love my mom because she tells me other stories too. About how she’s never seen a purple cow and never hopes to see one, but that she can tell me this right now: she’d rather see than be one. And about how one dark day in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight; back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other. And especially about how Once Upon a Time, there was a little brown bear, and he was the cutest little brown bear you ever did see, The End.
I love my mom because she is nice. It’s only when she’s mad, sometimes, that she yells, “Darn your hide!” at getting-in-trouble people. It’s only when that person is me that she complains, “You take ‘em in, you love ‘em like they were your own, and look how they turn out.” It’s only when the car in front of her at the stop light doesn’t start moving soon enough that she mutters, “It doesn’t get any greener than that” or “That’s the only color of green they’ve got where I come from.” It’s only when a car makes a turn without signaling that she exclaims, “I wouldn’t have a fancy car like that with blinkers that didn’t work.”
I love my mom because she answers all of my questions about cooking. She explains to me that things like avocados are sometimes so expensive because they are dipped in gold before being sold to me. She explains to me that to make egg salad, first you have to get a chicken. She explains to me that most of her recipes are old family recipes: she stole them from an old family.
I love my mom because she answers all of my questions about what time it is. “Half past kissin’ time, and time to kiss again,” she says. “Half past a freckle and a quarter to a hair,” she says. On Tuesday, when I ask her if it’s Tuesday, “All day, unless it rains,” she says.
I love my mom because she answers all of my other questions too. When I ask her why something is the way it is, she says, “Mine is not to wonder why; mine is but to do or die.” When I ask her what she’s doing, she says that she’s mildewing so she won’t mold. When she misspeaks or mixes up words, she says that her tongue got in front of her eye teeth and she couldn’t see what she was saying. And when I explain something to her, she says “‘I see,’ said the blind man to his deaf wife.”
I love my mom not only because she is freaking hilarious, but also is smart and clever and compassionate.
Dear Mom, it’s impossible for me to love you any less.
7 Comments
I’m glad you wrote this post.
I hope my mom is. :)
She is awesome and I like her.
The very first Mother’s Day card that I picked out for her all by myself proclaimed that she had always been like a mother to me. Which is true.
What a beautiful post!!! Your mom sounds like an absolute delight!!
Such an awesome tribute, Katie. Praying for your mom! And you.
Thanks for the thoughts and/or prayers! She’s doing better and is planning on coming home in the next few weeks.
My dad freaked my brother out when he told him that Mom was in critical condition (which she never was), apparently not remembering that the term “critical condition” has already been assigned a (scary) value in our language.
Very true, it did freak me out. And she is coming home a week from friday.
Hi,
I’m contacting you today because I’m working with authors Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris on a book about feelings on the web. We found an image on your blog that we found beautiful, and we wanted to get your permission to use it in the book. The book is based on the website We Feel Fine (http://www.wefeelfine.org). In return, we will give you a free copy of the book, signed by the authors, and an invitation to the book launch when the book comes out. A description of the site is below. I’d love to hear back from you and if you provide a mailing address, we can send you a permissions form.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been studying human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.
Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20’s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, that it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.
Thank you very much for your time,
Sincerely,
Matt
matt@wefeelfine.org
Privacy Notice:
We Feel Fine only collects and displays data that was already posted publicly on the World Wide Web. We Feel Fine never associates individual human names with the feelings it displays, though it always provides a link to the blog from which any displayed sentence or picture was collected. Also, bloggers may make a blog post invisible to the We Feel Fine crawler by including the following code somewhere in the post: nofeelings. Finally, you may request for an image to be taken down from the site by e-mailing someone@wefeelfine.org.
We Feel Fine is an independent project conceived and created by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar. It bears no affiliation to any company or organization.