What Kids Choose to Remember about Mom
/The Boston Herald
Home for the summer, my two older children sit and reminisce. Over breakfast, riding together in the car, in the family room late at night, they will be talking about something, anything, and a phrase, a song, a look will trigger a memory and out will come the inevitable, “Remember when?” And then a tale will be told then, a tale I imagined would be sweet and sentimental, in which I, of course, would be the hero. "Remember when you used to get us dismissed from school so we could go to the movies, Mom?” "Remember how you always took us to the beach on the first warm day of the year?” "Remember Jolly Cholly's and all the Halloween parties you let us have and the Easter you taped lollipops to the trees?”
Remember all the good times is what I expected. But in the memories my grown-up chidren love to share, I come out not as Auntie Mame but as the Wicked Witch of the West.
"Remember when you washed my mouth out with Palmolive soap, Mom?" my 19-year-old says. "Remember when you got so mad at me for playing with my food that you poured Giggle soup over my head?” (For the record, it was cold Giggle soup). “Remember when my room was a mess and you threw all the stuff that was on the floor out the window?” Three impetuous acts do not a mean mother make, I remind my son. Three acts should not be the sum and substance of his childhood memories.
They aren't, he assures me. He remembers the good times, too. But the bad times make better stories.
Two days ago, he was at the kitchen table with his 12-year-old sister who was grousing about having to ride her bike all the way to gymnastics, which is less than a mile away, when he swallowed what he was chewing, stared across the table and came out with a “I remember when I was your age..."
When he was her age, I drove him everywhere, to the movies, to the beach, to his friends. I drove his friends to the movies, to the beach and to their friend's. I didn't carry Giggle soup in the car or Palmolive soap and I never threw even the smallest toy out the window. I was home free. There was no way he could get a horror story out of this.
"When I was your age I got kicked off the school bus for a whole week. It was winter and freezing, and in the middle of the week it snowed and there was ice on the sidewalk and the middle school is two miles away and Mom made me walk every day," my son said.
The Wicked Witch struck again. Through ice and sleet and snow, on the coldest days of the year, I made my son walk to school.
"It was good that I walked," he continued. "It didn't kill me and it taught me to behave on the bus. It won't kill you to ride your bike to gymnastics," he told his sister.
"But Rob," she moaned. "I don't want to ride. Won't you drive me, please?"
He said no, so she rode her bike.
I imagine the stories she'll be telling someday about the miles she was forced to ride on the hottest day of the summer while her mother and brother sat at the kitchen table, talking and laughing and eating Ring Dings, while a fan blew cool air on them.
