This is for every night you heard me come home late as a teen-ager. Which was, actually, every night I came home late. “I couldn't sleep 'til I knew you were home,” my mother said the other day.

        Mothers worry. Fathers snore.

        This is for every Sunday you spent circling open houses in the newspaper and every night a customer called the house after 10 to talk about a contract falling through. It's for every time you went to work at 11 at night, to fix the contract. If you hadn't sold houses, I wouldn't have gone to an expensive college. This is for that burden.

        This is for the picture I still have, you and me beneath an ancient tree at my college graduation. You look so proud.

        This is for asking me if I had a spine whenever I slouched in a couch or hung a leg on the armrest of a chair.

        This is for chocolate chip cookies, fried chicken and cases of A&P cola in the summer. It's for the quarter you always left me on summer mornings before you went to work.

        It's for the key you took off my neck. For a couple years, I was a latch-key kid (before there were latch-key kids). My mom died when I was 8.

        I knew how to make frozen waffles and get myself to the school bus. I had my dad's phone number at work. I had the key to the apartment, tied to a sneaker lace, hanging from my neck.

        I was 9. Being alone at 9 is worse than being alone at 29 or 39. This is for marrying my dad, so I wouldn't have to be alone anymore. And neither would he.

        This is for giving me a sense of place. This is for ending the latch-key wondering.

        This is for the last time I introduced you as my stepmother, when I was a junior in high school, six years after we became a family. I'm sorry about that. Still.

        “What did you give me I wouldn't have gotten otherwise?” I asked my mother the other day.

        “A lot of grief,” she said.

        This is for making me dust baseboards on Saturday morning. OK, maybe it's not. No 12-year-old boy should have to tell his friends he can't play until he dusts the baseboards. But it is for making me do things around the house.

        It's for the white glove and for checking the corners, and for making me cut the grass twice if I missed a spot the first time. Doing it right once is easier.

        “Is there anything you'd change?” I wondered.

        “I would try to be more flexible with your curfews and your hair. I'd be more inflexible about leaving your dirty dishes under the bed.

        “I'd be more affectionate,” my mother said. “I just didn't know if it was worth it or not.”

        I survived. Love isn't touchy. This is for calling me “honey” and telling me I made you proud.

        This is for making me call my grandparents whenever I was home from college. Life is not a solo act.

        This is for stomping on the floor whenever I played the music too loud in the basement and for reminding me shoes did not belong in the living room.

        This is for every time we had this conversation:

        “What's for dinner?”

        “Food.”

        “What kind of food?”

        “Good food.”

        Fathers can be oblivious, or at least pretend to be. Detached from worry, guilt and the general mom-angst, we're there for discipline and ballgames. We're the last to know.

        Mothers do the heavy lifting. It's like winning the award for best supporting actress when the whole world knows that without you, there is no movie.

        “A sense of responsibility, I suppose,” she said at last. “Maybe I gave you that. A little more structure in your life, maybe not.”

        This is for the card I didn't send, because cards are insipid, tasteless and dopey.

        It's for never leaving things unsaid, for taking a moment to grab what you're feeling before it vanishes into the daily wash of the mundane.

        “You got an enduring memory of me as a kid?” I asked.

        “How innocent you looked when you were sleeping,” my mother said.

        This is for noticing that. Who else would? Who else but a mother?
        E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com
       

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