Confession: I appropriated this prompt from Steven Bechloss, who provides such a thought-starter most Saturdays. He wrote about Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother—inspiring—and, in what can only be described as striking contrast, the mothers of Lee Harvey Oswald (angry, controlling) and Nixon (per Nixon, a saint).

I’ve never been very excited about Mother’s Day. For starters, I disagree with the stylebooks’ use and placement of the apostrophe. What if you have two moms—and you love ‘em both the same? Why not just Mothers Day—acknowledging mothers without possessing one? But I digress.

Which may be something I got from my mother, who could turn a five-minute straightforward narrative into a half-hour of (amusing) verbal wandering around in backstory.  She also had a wicked sense of humor—she was Class Cut-up in her Muskegon (MI) HS yearbook, 1945.

My most memorable moments with my mom were not classic mother-daughter rituals. She never helped me pick out a wedding dress, and wasn’t present when I married my husband, in a judge’s chambers. She wasn’t there when I was in childbirth. She seldom commented on my major life decisions. We didn’t have long, rambling phone conversations because they would have been long distance—and her monetary meter would have been running.

But when I was in college, and came home late from summer jobs, we lay on either end of the couch eating ice cream and watching Johnny Carson and laughing at nothing much until tears ran down our cheeks. I always knew my mother loved me, and was proud of me, and that was enough.

The last words I said to my mother were “Love you,” and she replied, “Love you too, honey,” and then I hung up, and got on an airplane to Florida, for an education conference. I was awakened by a phone call early the next morning, telling me she was gone, at age 73, of a cerebral hemorrhage. It seemed like the final injustice, gone so soon, for a woman who lost her father at age seven, her husband at 52, and suffered a catastrophic health event a couple of weeks after she retired at 65, one that kept her hospitalized for months.

I know lots of people who have Mother Stories—adventurous moms, politically savvy wine moms of either party, domineering moms, crazy moms. I’ve heard people say that their mother was their biggest cheerleader, or nit-picky, never satisfied with their children’s life outcomes.

But not my mother. She never bailed me out, but she never made me feel like a failure, either. Instead, she was… steadfast. And kind of low-key and snarky. Fun to hang with, someone who took life as it came.

I think Steven Bechloss was looking at three typical models of mothers—the ones who shaped their sons for better or worse. During my 35 years in the classroom, I saw mothers who were high achievers and expected the same of their children. I saw bitter and controlling moms—and some who thought their sons could do no wrong, even when the evidence was flashing red, right in front of them.

But it always seemed to me that children are not possessions or projects or even direct reflections of their mothers. Good parenting helps, of course, but in the end, kids are born with self-determination, their own temperament and personality.      

I’m glad my mother let me be myself. I think it’s a practice worth considering, on Mothers (no apostrophe) Day.