Way back in the early days of the Internet, circa 1998 or so, Rachel and I, egged on by some friends (hi, M & H!), took an online personality survey, one of those Kinsey-type things, with approximately 100 questions that asked things like whether we picked the phone up on the first ring or let it go always to machine (machine! See how old the survey was — not voicemail, but machine!). Based on your answers, it then classified you into one of four personality types, and from there, into one of four further subtypes.

I would stake Isaac in a bet that Rachel and I answered every single question differently. You just have to trust me on this. We operate differently. And yet, AND YET … this computer program gave us not only the same personality type but also the same subtype. Meaning that, out of 16 possible configurations, we got the same one. (If math is your thing, tell me if I’ve got the odds of that correct.) Further, it wasn’t as though the whole world was equally divided among four personality types, further subdivided: the site explained that some types were much rarer than others. And that our type was very rare.

Our type?

Master controller.

This is essentially a metaphor for our relationship as a whole. We are both in charge, all the time, albeit in radically different ways. Fifteen years in, maybe we’ve mellowed. Maybe now we’re just apprentice controllers. In any case, we have mostly managed to make this work for us. Sometimes the aggression is too passive, sometimes we go for stretches where the passion loses some of its passion and then we aggressively work on finding the passion again. Occasionally the aggression is downright aggressive — or sometimes quite passionate, depending on your viewpoint — but, well … mostly it’s a tightly run ship around here. (Those of you who have witnessed the household firsthand will refrain from the comments section.)

(Oh, and although it’s too soon to say, I would stake Rowan in a bet that we are well on our way to raising another generation of master controllers. Just a hunch.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which Rachel and I are similar, and how we’re different. My sense is that we operate in a very small spectrum of similarity — and that within that spectrum, the differences are vast. In other words, we are a lot alike, but so close that the differences are noticeable. Or something like that. For the record, however, here are some of the ways in which we are fraternal:

1. Her: Gratification. Me: Deferral of. Rachel is really, really good at relaxing, whereas I am really, really good at doing the seven or eight things that need to get done before I can relax. Which usually means that I never end up relaxing, because by the time I get around to it, it’s time to go to bed. Rachel does not fold laundry while watching television. Rachel eats chocolate at the outset of an unpleasant task, and I fold T-shirts to Glee, while bouncing on my exercise ball.

2. Her: Scrabble. Me: Boggle. She claims that Boggle is too loud, and I claim that Scrabble is too long. In truth, they are our childhood games and we are loyal to them. And we can cream each other at our own games.

3. Rachel loses things and I find them. I was going to write, “I am the finder and Rachel is the…” but that seemed mean. But I can’t tell you how many conversations in our house goes something like:  Rachel: “Where are my—?” Susan: “Kitchen counter, next to the teapot.”

4. Her: Could sleep on a pile of rocks. Me: Earplugs, eye mask, 600 thread-count sheets, cats locked in the basement, the right pillows, utter and complete darkness and silence. This difference explains, in part, the next one:

5. Her: Camping. Me: Would rather be shot in the head.

6. Although we’re both omnivores, Rachel has been quicker to embrace the culinary traditions of my people — Eastern European Jews — than I have to embrace those of hers: the Brits. Although she maintains that she does not like a good brisket, she is completely on board for gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, lox and cream cheese (although we both concede that the Scots do a fine job with smoked salmon, too), rugelach, hamantaschen, etc. I., however, am not so good with custard, boiled suet puddings in bags with lots of raisins, fried Mars bars and the like. I like Yorkshire pudding and a good roast beef, but I’m not orgasmic about them. (Unless the roast beef is really, really rare.) We are both, however, equally passionate about Indian food, which is, really, what the British seem to do best. And we are both horrified by kishke.

7. We have different shoe sizes. This is likely a good thing, because if we wore the same size shoes, I could see us violating our vow not to share clothes (because that is just SUCH a slippery slope) and going all Carrie-Bradshaw-meets-John-Fluevog. And then we probably wouldn’t be able to feed the children.

8. Rachel pretends not to enjoy musical theater but secretly adores it, while I pretend not to like our grey tabby cat, but secretly don’t like our grey tabby cat. It’s just that she (the cat, not Rachel, who has personality in spades — she is, after all, the Queen of Irony) has no personality. Seriously, the cat is a cipher. There is no there there. She’s nearly transparent, except when she stands, oozing of blandness, in front of my computer monitor and obstructs my view of my work. She had serious potential as a kitten, and then completely fizzled out. It’s sad. It really is.

9. Rachel has fine, straight hair and  I. Do. Not. And I am jealous. Rachel has the hair I have spent my entire life coveting. Instead, I make do with lots of products, the master scissors of one Jimi Imij, hairstylist to the gods at Coupe Bizarre on Queen West in Toronto (and yes, I still travel to get my hair cut, because Jimi thins it out like nobody’s business; it looks like somebody had a litter of kittens on the floor by the time he’s done), and a straightening iron. This difference may also contribute to difference #5 above: it’s hard to enjoy camping when your hair immediately turns to crap.

10. When I cook, I follow the recipe. When Rachel cooks, she deviates. It’s a point of pride — she has to substitute one spice for another, double the cream, mess with the ratio of flour to sugar, etc. She can’t not do that. Rachel also likes to hover when I cook, asking questions like, “Did you put in the cumin?” “Yes,” I will say, “I put in the quarter teaspoon of cumin that the recipe called for.” “Oh,” she’ll say, “and what are you doing with those onions?” “I am going to fry them,” I will say, “just like it says to in the recipe.” “Oh,” she’ll say, “and—” and I will say, “The recipe is right there, and I think you should read it.” She maintains that she is simply making conversation, but I know she’s secretly itching to modify my recipe. (That sounds so suggestive, “Baby, can I modify your recipe?”) I’m all for improvisation, but I tend to reserve my improvisational skills for making up silly songs to sing to the kids. I do, however, double the vegetables in any recipe, because my mother told me to. And she was right.

Still, we eat well.

This post is part of the 5th Annual Blogging for LGBT Families Day, hosted by Mombian. Check out the other participating blogs! A very slightly different version of this essay appeared in the Winter 2010 edition of Lilith Magazine. Warning: tearjerker.

My girlfriend proposed — if you could call it a proposal — over the phone, long-distance, on a Sunday afternoon in October 2003. Cordless in hand, I was rooting through my fridge for something to eat when she said, “So, what do you think about getting married?”

I paused, the cold air from the refrigerator blowing in my face.

“Um,” I said, “okay.”

And that was that. We were getting hitched.

The Canadian province of Ontario had — finally — granted same-sex partners the right to marry only the previous summer, and all of a sudden “gay marriage” was on the radar, the topic of every conversation, garnering its own special section of the editorial pages each day and forcing Canadian queers to consider the question: Will you or won’t you, now that you can?

“Not us,” I had thought about me and Rachel. After all, we were good feminists. We both had master’s degrees in Women’s Studies, for god’s sake. Not for us the need for state sanction, that piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true. Not for us the capitulation to tradition.

And then, she asked. And all of a sudden it was us. When I asked her why, Rachel simply said, “It felt like a good approximation of where our relationship was at the time.”

She had a point. Eight and a half years in and counting, there we were. We’d just spent the previous year rescuing the relationship from near ashes, sitting across from a skilled therapist as we learned to talk to each other all over again, to wipe clear that pane of murky glass that seemed to be there between us, distorting our images of each other. She’d finished her doctorate, had got a tenure-track job teaching at a northern Ontario university. I’d built up my freelance career. We were looking at houses up north; I planned to move from Toronto to be with her in the fall. And we had booked the first flight for our sperm donor to fly in from Vancouver so we could begin the process of trying to have a baby.

We didn’t tell anyone for a few weeks. At first, Rachel didn’t want to tell anyone at all, ever. She wanted to elope, have a secret ceremony at City Hall and never mention it again. I think she was scared: if we said it out loud, if we told anyone, it would be real. But we were also scared of my family’s influence. I come from a family big on big weddings — weddings of the white-dress variety, with dozens of attendants. Weddings that cost tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of dollars. Weddings with DJs and klezmer bands, with first dances, with showers and rehearsals, with open bars and (I swear) mashed-potato bars and (kosher) hotdog carts wheeled in at midnight. Weddings with disposable cameras on the tables and head tables, preceded by a year’s worth of Friday-night dinners in honor of the engaged couple. My mother’s sister owns a bridal store. We had lots of reasons to be afraid.

Slowly, though, we both warmed to the idea of a public ceremony, on our own terms. We began to plan our ideal wedding: outside, maybe on one of the islands on Lake Ontario. Summer. A string quartet. Fantastic outfits. I would bake. A big party with family and close friends. We’d find a way to afford it.

And then we told my parents. More precisely, on a Sunday evening in November, we invited ourselves over for dinner and told them about our baby plans. “And there’s one more thing,” I said.

“There’s more?” my mother said, weakly. My father just grinned as he sat next to her on their family room couch, where she spent most of her time these days.

“There’s more,” I confirmed. “We’re getting married.”

What I thought was an afterthought became the main event. “You’re getting married? When?” asked my mother. “Where? How?”

We began to outline our vision: summer, outside, family and close friends—

“Well,” she interrupted, “you’ll have to do it here. At our house.”

Rachel and I looked at each other. I was about to explain why we couldn’t possibly hold the wedding at my parents’ house when Rachel said, “Okay. That would be lovely.” I looked at her as though she had gone insane. “What were you thinking?” I asked her in the car on the way home. “Well,” she said, “it’s just that it’s your mom.”

My mom. Who had reached out in dozens of small ways to my girlfriend over the years. Who had helped pave the way toward my father’s slow but eventually steadfast acceptance of my relationship. Whose chicken soup Rachel — at the time a vegetarian — ate without hesitation. My mother, battling breast cancer, there, on the couch.

And that was the end of the first wedding, and the beginning of the second. By Monday morning, my mother had notified all our relatives: I came home that evening to a half-dozen messages of mazel tov from scattered cousins, aunts and uncles, who promised to be there for our “big day.” By Tuesday morning, my mother was in full swing, brainstorming caterers and flower arrangements, guest lists and officiants.

“Um,” I said, “I’m not sure we can afford all this.”

She paused. “Oh, Susan,” she said, “we’d like to pay for it.”

It was a vast gesture of acceptance that I should have anticipated and hadn’t — and the fact that I hadn’t suggests that I was more caught up in doubts about the legitimacy of my own marriage than were my parents. For them, this wasn’t a “gay wedding.” It was their daughter’s wedding, and, damn it, they were going to do it up right.

 * * *

Doing it up right, I soon found out, meant a lot of details. We set the date: June 13. We met with the caterer. We negotiated the guest list, capping my parents’ friends to, in my mother’s opinion, an impossibly small number that seemed to grow as the weeks passed. (We had conversations like this: Her: “Gloria’s coming.” Me: “But she’s not invited.” Her: “I know. I told her that. And she’s still coming.”) We found a rabbi — possibly the only one in the city — who would agree to perform both an interfaith and same-sex wedding. A secular humanist Jew, her only conditions were that the ceremony contain no reference to God and no sexism. We could live with that. We booked the string quartet, asked my sister-in-law to do the flowers. I applied for our marriage licence: the forms hadn’t yet been updated to reflect the new legislation, and so my name was entered under the heading “groom.” I wondered which of the two men in line ahead of me at the registrar’s office would be a bride. After much convincing on the part of family and friends, we even registered, and then spent a couple of giddy hours debating china patterns and testing the fine blades of luxurious German knives.

In the meantime, we bought a house up north. We flew our donor in for a second try, then me to Vancouver for the third, which “took” — I was pregnant. My parents were over the moon. So was the rabbi.

And my mother’s chemo failed.

Through it all, we had tried to ignore the question that hovered, unspoken, in the backs of our minds: Would she make it to June 13? Back in October, we had been optimistic. Yes, my mom was weak, but for the past three years each successive round of chemotherapy, each new drug, had brought her back. Over the past 20 years she had survived, against astonishing odds, two previous bouts with cancer, one ovarian, one breast. The disease was the product of mutation 5382insC of a gene now known as BRCA-1 (BR for breast, CA for cancer). Women with this mutation — women like my mother, and her mother, who died of ovarian cancer in her 40s, and her mother, who died of breast cancer — have an up to 46% lifetime risk of developing ovarian cancer, and a 50 to 85% chance of developing breast cancer. One in 45 Ashkenazi Jewish people carry a BRCA mutation, as opposed to one in 800 to 1000 individuals in the general population. Their daughters — women like me — have a 50% chance of inheriting that mutation.

Those were the facts. And yet we couldn’t quite face them. Although my mother had tested positive for the genetic mutation, I had resisted testing. Never mind that I was pregnant — and potentially with a daughter to whom a Jewish family legacy of cancer could be bequeathed. Never mind that my mother’s cells were coded to multiply beyond her body’s capability to sustain them. I couldn’t think about my own mortality, and as for my mother, we thought she was invincible. We were counting on her track record of almost miraculous resilience: Why would this occurrence — breast cancer now metastasized — be any different?

And yet, it was. By April, she was vomiting up most of what she ate, and had started spending nights as well as days on the couch, because the walk up the stairs was too hard. She found it increasingly difficult to breathe.

We all saw the third wedding coming, but we hesitated. Finally, my mother said out loud the words no one else had been able to say. She’d spent the night at the hospital in respiratory distress; the doctors had drained two litres of fluid from around her right lung, the one that didn’t have a catheter in it already. We had an appointment with the palliative care doctor the next morning.

“Susan,” she said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it to June 13.”

“We’ll change the date,” I said. “We’ll do it sooner.” She nodded. My father just looked into his lap as he sat next to her on the couch. I didn’t cry until I phoned the rabbi to reschedule.

We settled on Mother’s Day, May 9, three weeks away. It was the closest we could fathom pulling everything together. It would be a truncated affair, just family and a few close friends at my parents’ house, no dates, no quartet. Our families changed their flights. We flew up north, signed the lawyers’ papers on the house, flew home, found rings and outfits, met with our midwife. We printed off our ketubah (no God, no sexism) — no time to commission anything custom. I had a pre-wedding pedicure, and then burst into tears when the polish smudged. “All I want is for my toenails to look nice,” I wailed in the car on the way home. Rachel looked at me sideways. “Is it really your toes you’re upset about?”

Meanwhile, my mother deteriorated rapidly. She had moved from the couch to a hospital bed we’d set up in the family room, but she could no longer get comfortable. Even small efforts like going to the washroom became overwhelming. My father spent hours trying to convince her to eat something, anything, but she wasn’t hungry, and her body wasted, wisps of chemo-thin hair framing her gaunt face. She had coughing fits that left her exhausted. Some combination of drugs and disease left her unfocused and anxious, confused or annoyed. “I know I’m not making sense,” she told me. “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to make sense.”

The night before the ceremony, we ordered in Thai for the immediate family members who had congregated. My mom napped in the family room while we ate quietly in the kitchen, unsure how to work her decline into the celebration, how to acknowledge such sorrow in the midst of what was supposed to be joy. The food tasted like sawdust.

“I’m not sure I can go through with this,” I told Rachel at the door as she left to meet her mother at our downtown apartment. I was going to sleep at my parents’ home, on night duty.

The next morning, the tips of my mother’s fingers had turned dusky and I wasn’t able to rouse her. But her chest rose and fell, and so I called up denial, found the now-much-too-big clothes she wanted to wear and laid them out, to help her into later on. She died while I left the room to eat breakfast and while my father was at his computer, printing out his toast to the brides. “Excuse me?” said the home-care worker. “Miss? I think that your mother is not breathing.”

We held the funeral the following day. My cousins, already assembled for the wedding, were pallbearers. The wedding caterer fed the hundreds of people who showed up at the house following the burial. Rachel and I exchanged rings privately, then sat shivah.

The fourth wedding was on June 13, in my parents’ backyard — a much smaller affair then we’d originally planned: just family and a few close friends, hors d’oeuvres and lunch. In the photos of the ceremony, we all look so sad under the chuppah: my father and brother are holding back tears; my sister-in-law wears dark glasses, and Rachel and I clutch each other’s hands and stare straight into each other’s eyes, biting our lips. At three months pregnant (with, as it turned out, a boy, who would be named for his Bubbe), I am barely showing. When the time came to break the glass, though — because according to Jewish tradition, in each simcha we are always reminded of our sorrows — we couldn’t do it. We tried, but maybe there had been too much sorrow already. Our high heels simply pushed the glass deeper into the soft ground, where it stayed resolutely whole, unbroken, unbreakable.

So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a post about Mother’s Day without turning it into some huge pity party where I’m that host who ties on a few too many and then starts ranting while you, the politely horrified guest, back away slowly, a frozen smile on your face, before finding both a place to set down your half-full glass of Pinot Noir and an excuse to leave quickly.

But here’s the thing: Mother’s Day is a painful holiday if you don’t have a mother. Now, I realize that many people out there have or had terrible relationships with their mothers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they too find Mother’s Day at best annoying and at worst horrible. But if you actually loved your mother and liked her a lot, too, then that second Sunday in May can much too easily become a yawning chasm of desperate longing. If you both loved and also liked your mother, and she died too young smack-dab ON MOTHER’S DAY, then there’s very little left to redeem the holiday. Especially if you were pregnant at the time with your first child and felt, irrational as it may sound, that everything might be okay if she could just stick around long enough to meet your baby. Especially if — and this is where you start looking for your coat because the whole thing really gets too maudlin, and you really can’t keep the sitter waiting — you were, oh, going to get married on that particular Mother’s Day but then, of course, had to cancel the wedding and instead plan a funeral.

It’s a challenge. I don’t like being jealous of my friends who can call up their mothers not only on Mother’s Day but any old time they want, who go out for Mother’s Day brunch or barbecues or mom-and-daughter mani-pedis and such. Over the past five years, my jealousy and my grief have diminished, but they’re still there, pinpricks targeting the balloons of other people’s joy.

Of course, the situation is complicated by the fact that — hey! — I now have children of my own, children who don’t and shouldn’t grasp the extent of my ambivalence about this holiday. This weekend, Rachel and I will receive kindergarten- and babysitter-crafted gifts from two wee boys whose worlds still revolve largely around not one but two mommies. And I will find it touching, but slightly empty.

My mother never liked sentimentality. In fact, she wasn’t a fan of Mother’s Day, put up with my five- and six-year-old insistence on making her breakfast in bed even though she drank only instant coffee in the mornings and hated crumbs in the sheets. One year, when I was about 11, I found a card that read, “Happy Mother’s Day — now go away and leave me alone.” “That’s perfect,” she said.

My mother’s own mother died when she was 17, but she never talked about it, brushed off my questions about how she felt with answers like, “It was a different time then. We didn’t have relationships with our parents the way you do today.” I’m not so sure she’d be thrilled to with my harping on about the whole thing — online, no less. Probably she’d say something like, “Just open the card and eat a piece of toast in bed and hug those two boys and get through the day like you would any other.” Because, of course, the cliché is also true: for those of us in the trenches — and who isn’t, in some way? — every day is Mother’s Day. All those days add up to a lifetime — however long — of memories, and the point is to have the good ones far outweigh the bad.

So happy Mother’s Day to all of you. And for those of you who have lost a mother, I’m raising my glass of Pinot Noir to you. Grit your teeth and eat a piece of toast in bed and remember the best things about your mother.

And if you’ve read this far — thanks for sticking around.

The car is aging.

I mean that, of course, in the sense that the car is — like the rest of us — getting older. But I also mean that the car ages me. As in, I gain a couple of decades whenever I slide behind the wheel of our late-model, Big-Three sedan. It is — and I use this term fondly — a dad car, a car your father might drive, a car my father did drive for several years before upgrading and generously bequeathing it to us.

All my cars, actually, with the exception of the Chevy Cavalier my brother and I shared for two weeks one summer in our teens before it was stolen out of our driveway one night and later found on the outskirts of town with vomit and heroin works in the backseat, have been dad cars: the Pontiac something or other, the Cadillac Sedan Deville, the Dodge Intrepid, and now our current beast. The running theme, of course, has been the price. For me, “free” tends to trump “pride” when it comes to vehicles: if the price I have to pay for not going into hock over a car is that people assume that the carseats in the back are for my grandchildren, well, then, that’s fine with me. Our current car is popular with the seniors here in Thunder Bay. People tend to do a double take when they see me behind the wheel. “But she’s too young,” they must be thinking. “Hi Gramps!” my friend Daphne calls whenever I drive by. My friend Jody giggles whenever she sees it. “It just doesn’t … fit … with the rest of you,” she said once, and I wanted to hug her. (Or maybe hit her.) She, of course, drives a Harley. (Or is that “rides”?)

Still, I have a soft spot for our eleven-year-old car, partly because my mother also drove it. I can still picture her behind the wheel, faintly remember conversations we had while driving, and imagine she’d get a kick out of seeing me drive by, two kids in the back, barking, “Do I need to stop driving or can the two of you stop hitting each other?”

But the car is aging. We are entering, I fear, that period of increasingly rapid automotive decline, where repairs edge out maintenance and visits to the mechanic inch closer and closer together. It’s all the little things: the door to the glove compartment doesn’t close properly; Rowan’s seatbelt gave out last week, forcing us to move his booster seat into the middle (fortunately, he says he likes being next to Isaac, but you know that’s just a chicken fight waiting to happen); the brights don’t stay on unless you hold down the lever; every so often, the driver’s-side windshield wiper takes on a life of its own and whaps around the side of the car to smack the driver’s-side window. The paint is chipping, the shocks are iffy, the electronic locks work only intermittently, you have to hold up the hood with one hand while you check the oil, and the cup holder spring mechanism is busted. That said, it still looks fairly respectable and gets us from A to B without fuss.

There is aging, of course, and there is aging. Time passes by at the same rate for us all, I realize, but my children are growing, developing, becoming stronger, more realized, versions of their own selves. I, on the other hand, like the car, seem to be aging in the sense of getting older, where regular maintenance is designed to slow down the decline rather than actually improve things, where pain moves on a regular sightseeing tour throughout my body: neck, shoulders, wrists, knees, ankles. My forearms are shit. I have vertigo, just like my mother did, and it gets worse every year. I chew cold things only on the left side of my mouth. My lower back hurts. The index fingernail on my right hand is thickening and developing a permanent split. I’m going grey. My vision is still rock solid, but that’s only because I had laser eye surgery four years ago. I may be getting wiser, but I am losing nouns, names, just like they (I forget who) said I would. I can still touch my toes, but I worry that, if I skip a week, I won’t be able to any more.

I am told this is just the beginning.

That said, I  like to think I still look fairly respectable and I can get from A to B without much fuss.

In my head and my heart, I am a Prius girl, or maybe a Subaru Outback or even a Mazda 5 kind of driver. (In my slightly wilder dreams, I’m driving on the coast, any coast, in a red, two-seater, convertible MG.) In my head and my heart, I can stay out all night dancing, type like the wind, squat to pick up my toddler without grimacing as I straighten my knees. In real life, I’m hoping the current car lasts us until Isaac is in school full time and we can shift our child care budget over to car payments.

On Thursday morning, I wrote about discovering — quite accidentally — one of my mother’s former students. She taught him — and his best friend — in seventh grade. He told me about how, at age 13, he fell in love with my mother. As did his best friend. And that, as I wrote, “he and his best friend — who is still his best friend, 40 years later — have had, during their friendship, only one, unresolved, ongoing feud: which one of them my mother liked best. How they still argue about it, about her.”

Thursday afternoon, I got an e-mail from the best friend.

(If I were partial to emoticons there would be a smiley face here. Maybe a sort of sentimental, slightly teary, smiley face. But I’m not partial to emoticons so you’ll just have to take my word for this.)

The best friend said, in part, “I wanted to drop you a line to express my sympathies about your mom’s untimely death. She was a great teacher and a fine person. She made learning fun and had a profound effect on the people she taught. Not a bad legacy for someone who wasn’t on this earth nearly long enough.”

I sent him a black-and-white photo of my mom, and he wrote back: “That photo brings back a lot of good memories. Yes, your mom was stunning.  But she had other things going for her. She was only the second Jewish teacher I ever had outside of Hebrew school. And she was probably the youngest teacher I ever had. I once found her grad photo in [the] yearbook, possibly 1961. This means when she taught us in 1966–7, she was 23 or so, barely out of teacher’s college. She was a lot easier to relate to as a teacher than some fossilized version of 30 or 40 (I’m being ironic here).”

He remembers, he says, my mom drilling them on writing, “something that didn’t thrill me at the time but which I’m now grateful for every day.”

And he sent me photographs of my mother, yearbook snapshots that he asked her for — that he asked her for — how adorable is that? — each year. And here they are:

1966–67

1967–68

1968–69

If there was an emoticon for being sucker-punched in the gut, but in a good way, with a wave of nostalgia (or maybe that’s longing) for something you didn’t even experience, I would insert that here. But… well, you know.

“She was so nervous,” my father recalls about my mother and all those seventh-graders. “She was just out of teacher’s college, and they were an advanced class, and she had no special training. And they just adored her.”

My mom left that school to move to Toronto with my father after the 1968-69 school year. My brother was born in 1970 and I was born 21 months later, at the end of 1971. “Her departure was a real loss,” the best friend told me. “You don’t easily replace a teacher of her calibre.”

And you don’t easily forget her, either.

So I’m writing a newsletter for this client, and they’re revitalizing their board, and they have some new members, and so part of my job this morning is to contact the new members and get their thoughts and visions for the organization’s future direction, and then write it all up in a nice dynamic story of 300 words or less.

So, I phone the first two new board members, and get voicemail, and leave chipper voicemail messages. And then I get a live person at the end of my third call. And he is helpful and concise and enthusiastic and gives me exactly what I need in terms of quote. And I notice from his e-mail address that he works at the same firm as my first cousin, and so I mention that, and then his voice takes on a whole new tenor.

“Wait a second,” he says. “Let’s take this in a whole new direction. Are you related to Ruth Goldberg?”

Which is not quite what I’m expecting. “She’s my mother,” I tell him.

“Listen,” he says, “I have to tell you this: I was in love with your mother. She was my first love.”

Mine too, I’m thinking. “Really?” is what I say.

He tells me the story, but he also tells me that he’s probably going to cry. My mom was his seventh grade teacher. And she was so bubbly, and enthusiastic, and beautiful. And that he and his best friend — who is still his best friend, 40 years later — have had, during their friendship, only one, unresolved, ongoing feud: which one of them my mother liked best. How they still argue about it, about her.

He tells me about his mother dragging his father to “meet the teacher” night. About how when his father saw my mother for the first time his jaw dropped to the floor and stayed there. How when his parents returned home all his mother would say was, “Your father’s an idiot.” About how his father, six months later, asked just when the next parent-teacher night would be and his mother said, flatly, “You’re not going.”

But really, can you blame any of them? I mean, if a Liz Taylor–look-alike was your seventh grade teacher? “She was beautiful,” the man on the other end of the phone said. “And she dressed up for school in these beautiful outfits. We had teachers who wore the same thing every day for 20 years.”

I remember my mother talking about that class, about her saying, matter-of-factly, “They were all in love with me.”

The other thing she told me was that she made them learn how to write a proper sentence. “We wrote sentence after sentence — subject, verb, object — paragraph after paragraph, until they got it. My students knew how to write a sentence.”

“One of the worst days of my life,” this man tells me over the phone, “was the day I learned that your mother was getting married. And not to me.”

Thirteen years old. And then, four or so decades later, a different kind of pain. “When your mother died,” this man tells me, “I was heartbroken.”

“Me too,” I say. And I tell him I remember the letters his best friend wrote: to my mom, when she was alive, to tell her what a great teacher she was and the impact she had on his life; and to my family, after my mom died, to tell us, again, that he thought of her often and fondly. And what he — and the world — had lost.

And what I found just a tiny bit of this morning.

I’m thrilled to have an essay published in the current issue of Lilith Magazine. Check out “Four (Same-Sex, Half-Jewish) Weddings and a Funeral,” in which, as the magazine puts it, “the author’s unconventional wedding plans get less conventional as she lets her mother, fighting breast cancer, take over the planning.”

You want talking about death? We got that, plus weddings and babies. What more could you want? If you can’t find the mag in, say, Thunder Bay, you can order it online.

Can’t wait to see what they’re planning for Mother’s Day.

And, you know? I really was going to end there. Because, for those of us who have lost mothers, sometimes the less said about Mother’s Day, the better. Short and sweet.

And then, like an idiot, I realized that today is May 8. And that my mother died five years ago today. On Mother’s Day, in fact. What are the odds?

My mother had lots of opportunities to die. In 1982, when she was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and the cancer was given 95% odds, her 5%. When she totalled her car later on that year, her only injury the cut on her hand sustained as she crawled out the broken driver’s window of the upended vehicle. When she developed breast cancer at age 47. When the cancer returned, and returned again.

When she did die, at the age of 59, my mother still had lots more living to do. But certain things had been accomplished: namely, her children were grown. We were out of the house, developing careers, established in relationships with people she liked. My brother had two children; I was pregnant with my first. We were okay. And, even though there was so much left to live for, I think she knew that a fundamental job was done. We might have wanted a mother, desperately wanted her, but we no longer needed her to mother us.

There’s a fine, or maybe, rather, a fuzzy, line between want and need, though. While I may not need my mother to sign my permission forms or kiss my boo-boos any more, never in my adult life have I wanted her more than when I became a mother. The early days of parenting for me were a haze of grief and sleep deprivation, the coldest winter in years in a new city, where I barely knew a soul. I would have given anything to have her back, have her with me, even if she would have probably told me to calm down and relax and just put the baby in his bed and walk away. Maybe she would’ve made me crazy in ways I wasn’t already, but, you know? I don’t think so. And I don’t really care.

And now that those early days are behind me, now that I have more perspective on the whole thing, now that sleep has (more or less) returned and the grief isn’t all-encompassing, all the time, I still want her back the way I want nothing else. Just so that she could see those two small boys, clutching dandelions and bluebells in their fists. Just so she could drop to her knees and gather them all in her arms.