Happy Mother's Day

I'm not a big fan of what I call Hallmark holidays, but I can't avoid all the ads for Mother's Day and my impending motherhood has been on my mind lately. So Mother's Day 2009 has brought me to an unknown level of sappiness. However, as many of you know, the one person missing the most from my life is my own mom. While there are times when I miss my mom as much as I did two and a half years ago, I at least can laugh about a lot of memories. And if you believe I get my quirks from her, there's a lot to laugh about.

My mom and I must share the same reasoning process. Although she had experience with booking open-end airline tickets for her kids who'd be abroad for a year, when it came time for my brother to spend another year abroad in college, she had developed a fascination (well, that was our only explanation) with Iceland Air and booked my brother on a one-way ticket out of Baltimore (we lived less than a half an hour from Philadelphia International) at twice the cost of a round-trip ticket.

My mom had her own, unexplained, reasons for what she did and did not trust. Mainly, she did not trust my brother or me not to lose anything. For instance, despite the oft-mentioned years my brother and I spent abroad, our passports had to stay in our mom's possession unless we were actively using them. If one of us misplaced a wallet or purse, our carelessness would be counted against us well into adulthood. I never even had a key to my childhood home (well, until today, when I flew back to Minnesota with a key my brother had given me to use during my weekend visit, still in my bookbag). Instead of giving her children a key they could too easily lose, she found it safer to hide a key in a purple envelope on our three-season porch. For those of you who are aghast that I've given away my mom's secret hiding spot and made our house vulnerable to thieves, I welcome you to visit our house - and challenge you to find that key in the clutter on our porch.

She didn't trust ATM cards either. "Someone could steal your wallet and wipe out your bank account!" she barked at me as she rushed to the bank before it closed and I unsuccessfully tried to argue the convenience of 24-hour ATM use. Yet when my brother and I were living abroad, she trusted mailing the two of us large amounts of cash (wrapped in a few scraps of paper to spoil those would-be mail thieves). She apparently also distrusted Western Union (or was too cheap to pay the fee for wiring). I have no idea how the parents of my American friends sent money, because I never bothered asking. My mom undoubtedly would not have been convinced of doing anything differently. But as ludicrous as my roommates thought her system was, not a single shipment of cash was ever lost in the mail.

While cash in the mail was a welcomed surprise, it wasn't the only mail we received. My mom had a habit of mailing us random things she found at garage sales, or often, just things she found around the house that she thought we'd need. Those items were often wrapped for protection with other random things she found around the house (we couldn't get her to recycle newspapers and bottles, but in hindsight, she was actually a good recyler in other respects). I'd learned in a Wilderness First Aid course that sanitary napkins should be a part of any first aid kit - was never told they could be a good alternative to Styrofoam peanuts!

When I was an exchange student in Switzerland, I had acquired a small collection of Swatch watches, but later developed different tastes and they were stored, forgotten, in a bureau drawer. That is until they showed up nearly ten years later in an envelope in my mailbox in Minneapolis. I've spent my whole adult life trying to wean myself from pack-rat habits I believe I inherited through some Harbach gene, and I grew more and more infuriated as I made no progress in convincing my mom to stop mailing me stuff. Living 1,000 miles away wasn't a deterrent for her. Possibly only the only way to foil her shipments would have been if the US Postal Service had discontinued mail service to Minnesota.

If she couldn't unload things on her kids, she turned to their unsuspecting friends. I lived with seven other friends in a large house during my senior year of college and we ended up with duplicates or even triplicate of all the household basics. My mom showed up for a visit with a carload of unrequested items, including three cookie sheets. When I got her to put them back in the car, I actually believed she understood my explanation that we didn't need additional cookie sheets to add to the eight we already had. I went up to my room and five minutes later, one of my roommates came up to my room and squealed, "Your mom is so nice. Look, she brought us cookie sheets!"

Awhile after my mom died, my brother and I found an old notebook stuffed in a drawer. The first couple of pages listed household items, how much they cost and the total. My brother realized that what was listed were all the things she had bought at garage sales in preparation for setting him up in his first apartment. An experienced garage sale bargain hunter, she had managed to do this all for a mere $50. Unfortunately, my brother continued to live at home when he went back to school, and all those amazing garage sale finds remain stored on our porch.

I imagine that if my mom were alive today, her first grandchild would be well taken care of. Although I never received the typical CARE packages full of homebaked goodies, (I guess instead of baking cookies for her college-age children, she was busy giving away the cookies sheets)I can trust that boxes - with a single note of "For the baby" scribbled on a piece of notebook paper - would arrive weekly on my doorstep. The contents would be a complete surprise. We would never know if were about to come into possession of clothing our children won't be able to fit into until age 8, or 200 cloth diapers (when it's recommended you need about 30) or something we'd actually been looking for.

I've been teased by some family members for inheriting my mom's sense of humor - or lack thereof - but I think she had one, because I know she would have been able to laugh at all the stories I just recounted. She really had no explanations for these quirks, but then again, neither do I for my own.