Myra

Since it's Mother's Day in just a few hours, I thought I would introduce you to my mother. Her name is Myra and she is the last of the fifties brides that went straight from their fathers house to their husbands. Her generation did not have apartments and careers. They got married.

She grew up in South Beach, Florida, where she lived with her parents and her sister, just off of Collins Avenue. When she was in high school, she loved a boy named Allen. Towards the end of their senior year, my grandfather AJ began asking what Allen's "intentions" where. Allen crumbled under the pressure, and ran away from my mother as fast as he could. Grandpa AJ had that same effect on all of us. We still wonder about Allen to this day and what could have been.

To escape her father, she moved to Chicago to live with her cousin. My mother's best friend, Binnie, had a brother named Larry. One day, my mother wandered into the brothers bedroom and he was on the top bunk listening to a record. My mother, who thought it was strange sounding music, asked my father "what's that music?", to which he replied "that's jazz", thus beggining a conversation that continued for the next twenty odd years. And that's how my mother met my father.

Once, when they were still dating, my father told my mother that he felt sad. It was a very rainy afternoon, and he thought they should go walk in the rain and just embrace the sadness. My mother, who is a beauty queen, melts in the rain, but agreed to go anyway, because that's love.

She was wearing a wig, which she had just washed the night before using just a dab of dish soup. As they walked in the rain, holding hands and being poetic, her wig began to bubble up. Soon, she had soap streaming everywhere and my father is looking at her like a science project. They start to laugh, but then the soap starts to run in her eyes and blind her, so my father pulls the wig off her head and they stand laughing hysterically in the rain.

In the next four years, my mother gave birth to three girls. Back in those days, before the epidural, women in labor were given sodium penathol for pain. Sodium penathol is a very strong narcotic known as "truth" serum. She had been in labor for many hours, and for the last few hours had been listening to the rhythm of the screaming of another woman giving birth down the hall.

At first the screaming was a bit of a curiosity to her, thinking "better her than me", while still feeling empathy. After about three hours, though, my mother couldn't stand listening to the woman screaming down the hall any longer and was beginning to resent her.

So, my mother finally says to the nurse "NURSE, CAN YOU PUH-LEASSSSE SHUT THAT WOMAN UP?!!"

To which the nurse replied "But Mrs. Rosenberg, that's you".

At the height of her career outside of the home, she was working in the basket room at a local gym. People would come in to work out, change in the locker room, put their belongings in a basket, and check the basket at the counter. My mother was the "basket lady".

My sisters and I spent a lot of time after school at the gym, waiting for our mother to get off work. It was a great job for her because it came with facilities that served as after school care for us. When I was around 8, I would hang around the basket room with my mother and listen to all the conversations she had with people checking in and out. It was how I first became a conversational voyeur, I loved listening to people confide in my mother, asking her advice about their lives.

It was the first time that it ever occurred to me that she had a name other than "mom" or "honey", and I liked that. She seemed like a Myra. When I asked her if I could call her Myra, she thought it was funny. Nothing made me happier than making my mother laugh. From that day on, I've called her Myra and it stills cracks her up.

My mother was a widow at 36, living in a strange city with no family, with three little girls to raise. She didn't do everything as well as I wish she had, but I never doubted her love. When I was a kid, she told me if I ever ran away, I had to take her with me. We said we would go to Switzerland, and eat choclate covered almonds for dinner, and never come back. Hey, it's never too late.