There’s a reason that Cupid’s commemoration comes so soon after the Super Bowl. It’s an obvious test of the depth of men’s romantic tendencies, and, sadly, it’s a test they fail more often than a Cosmo relationship quiz.

My husband, God love him, is no exception. He will not become aware that it’s time to pay homage to the holiday of the heart until he begins slipping on newspapers that I place in front of the shower. As he steps out, dripping wet and then quickly ends up face down on the floor, staring at a full-page ad that mentions Valentine’s Day in a font large enough to be seen by the astronauts on the space station, a light will begin to dawn.

It has taken a mere 20 years of this type of subtle training for my beloved to become adept at interpreting signals from his sweetheart. This year, I can expect a heart-warming present designed to compensate for past transgressions — something like a useless kitchen item that we already have or an exquisitely wrapped collection of hotel toiletries. I haven’t, however, always been so fortunate.

One year, just after our second child was born, I received a bottle of stretch mark-treating cocoa butter clearly purchased last minute at the nearest 24-hour drugstore. This was accompanied by a box of Christmas candy with a 75-percent-off sticker and a card (sans envelope) featuring two kissing chimps. In an attempt to personalize the card, my man had tenderly tried his hand at poetry. Under his name, he’d written:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You want my body
I know you do.

I’ve also received my share of ego-shattering lingerie, little bits of fluff that would barely fit the anorexic hips of a Victoria’s Secret model. But the worst was a pair of silk pajamas – size XL — that my husband brought back from a business trip to China. Designed for the smaller Asian woman, these pernicious PJs wouldn’t go past my knees. I can tell you, nothing gets a wife in the mood for love more than struggling to fit into anything marked XL. I’m still in therapy over that.

My spouse has also tried to be sweet with scent. One year, he gave me two sample-size bottles of the same perfume worn by his mother for the past five decades. Big, big mistake.

Another time, in a bid to impress me with his thoughtfulness, he procured a cylinder head from a World War II-era airplane (if you don’t know what this looks like, consider yourself lucky) and created a lovely lamp that added a certain je ne sais quoi to our living room décor. It took me weeks to arrange an accident that sent this romantic piece of wreckage back to the junkyard.

I’m hoping that by our 30th or possibly 40th anniversary, my mate will have progressed to the point where he’ll fill a vase with a single rose and a diamond necklace, or maybe the keys to a new Jaguar. In the meantime, I’ll try not to lose heart.

© Jackie Papandrew 2008

Jackie’s hilarious new book — Airing My Dirty Laundry — will soon be available. Please visit www.jackiepapandrew.com to read more.

Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead. — Erma Bombeck

By some strange twist of fate, I’ve brought forth a football fanatic. My son is one of those addled individuals whose very DNA, I’m convinced, has a pigskin membrane. Unfortunately for him, he has a mother who wouldn’t know a touchdown from a hoedown. For the life of me, I can’t understand the appeal of the game – a chaotic mix of men pushing, shoving and bellowing, slobber and obscenities flying. And that’s just the fans.

But my boy has been hooked from an early age, spending countless hours watching, playing and dreaming about football. He’s consumed whole forests of paper drawing intricate plays marked with Xs and Os. And I’ve grown tearful remembering other Xs and Os my sweet child long ago scribbled on construction-paper cards, right under the words “I Love You, Mommy.”

I’ve tried, occasionally, to fight back. Once, I suggested he end a six-hour football fest and read a book. But my son has the same regard for reading that I have for cellulite, and his withering response cut me to the quick.

“Print is dead, Mom. Nobody reads anymore.”

“There is no way,” I wailed, “no way you came from my loins!”

He gave me a blank look. “What’s a loin?”

By the time he reached adolescence, his fixation had reached a fever pitch, and when he made the high school team, his ecstasy knew no bounds. He even figured out how to combine his pigskin passion with the only other thing that currently captures his interest. The kid who can barely find time to do his homework or hold a meaningful conversation with his mother nobly volunteered to coach his school’s powder puff football team, a fact that seemed to fill his father with pride.

“It is a great way to meet girls,” said my husband, his chest expanding. I just shook my head.

Realizing it was a losing battle, I decided, reluctantly, to embrace the madness. I boned up on gridiron lingo and proudly spread the word to all my pals about my boy’s performance on the team. Sadly, my football-averse friends failed to point out that I’d gotten his position slightly wrong. I found that out when I went to pick him up after a powder puff practice. Approaching a pack of puffs on the sidelines, I smiled warmly.

“My son is your coach,” I said. “He’s a loose end, you know, on the school’s team.”

For some reason, the group of girls began to giggle. Baffled, I later informed my son that some of his puffs were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. “They were laughing at me for no reason.”

His face acquired a look of dread. “Mom,” he said slowly, between gritted teeth, “what did you say to them?”

“I just said you’re a loose end on the team.”

He grabbed his head with both hands as if he expected it to explode and wanted to catch the pieces. “I’m a tight end,” he practically screamed. “Not a loose end!”

“Tight end, loose end,” I shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

He avoided me like the plague for several days after that. To redeem myself, I invited some of his friends over to watch a game on the obscenely enormous new television the men in my household had insisted was vital to our existence. I’ve noticed that when you combine 52-inch, high-def and TV in a sentence, it induces a Pavlovian response in males of any age. Sure enough, my son’s buddies began to salivate at these words and eagerly agreed to come.

I gained some yardage right off by offering snacks. Then, perhaps overconfident, I attempted to lose my rookie status by tossing out lingo I’d learned like blitz, field goal and third and long. But then I fumbled by mentioning how attractive I found the teams’ costumes. My boy’s mouth compressed into a scrimmage line of fury. “Mom,” he muttered, “stop it!”

Feeling unwelcome, I retreated to another part of the house, where my eye fell on several baskets full of clean clothes in need of folding. Taking advantage of the idle hands in my living room, I placed a basket in front of each boy. You’d think, by the looks of horror on their faces, that I was experiencing a Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunction right in front of them.

“You want us to fold during football?” one gasped as nacho cheese dribbled down his chin. My son was speechless, emitting only strange, inhuman noises that made me fear for his sanity.

“Never mind,” I sighed, retreating. That’s when I understood that football and I could never be allies; we’d have to remain wary competitors, sharing the love of our loose end. Then I went to fold my laundry.

© Jackie Papandrew

www.jackiepapandrew.com

Or something like that.

For my husband, this frosted fantasy is more than 20 years old and revolves around his balmy bachelor days when he drove a little red sports car and spent his weekends logging hours as a private pilot. He keeps a picture of himself — I call it his Top Gun picture — from those days. He’s leaning against that sports car, handsome and dashing in a flight suit, with his airplane in the background. The car and the plane are long gone, and the flight suit would require a considerable amount of alternation if he wanted to wear it now (sorry, dear), but I know my Tom Cruise clone still sees himself as that studly single man.

My flash-frozen picture of myself occurred about the same time, back in my skinny season, when I first wore a Little Black Dress. For a woman, the LBD is far more than a piece of clothing. It’s a canvas on which she can showcase her stylish self, one of the most important items in her wardrobe. And once a woman, say one like me, has felt beautiful in this essential item of apparel (a la Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s), she tends to assume she will always look good in it.

So with this assumption firmly in mind and having not worn an LBD for quite a while, I went shopping recently for a new little black dress to wear to this year’s holiday parties. I had my teenage daughter and my mother in tow. And I stumbled upon a shocking scandal, one that should have every woman in the country up in arms.

Someone is sabotaging the LBD. Someone, probably the same folks adding lead to children’s toys, is removing fabric from the fundamental fashion frock and skewing the sizes. These pernicious people have a lot to answer for.

I tried on dress after dress in what I thought would be a quick quest for a trendy, yet timeless LBD. I started, naturally, with the size that I know fits me, the size that has fit me for years. But for some reason, the dresses in my size failed to flatter my figure. In fact, each terribly tight toga refused to go much past my knees! I was astounded, and then annoyed, as my size-zero, soon-to-be-disowned daughter snickered and rather cruelly implied that my love for a certain Italian dessert could have contributed to my size shrinkage problem: (”Oh, tiramisu,” she said mockingly, “how could you?”)

My mom, trying to be helpful, began bringing me LBDs in larger sizes. I refused to try them on.

“That’s my size and I’m sticking to it!” I said heatedly, pointing to one of the discarded dresses.

A warm flush of embarrassment began to spread over my face and threatened to melt that icy illusion in my head.

That’s when I realized I was the unwitting victim of a vast LBD conspiracy. These people are trying to make me look fat and send me into the little black dress doldrums. But I won’t give them that satisfaction. I want my original size back. I’m calling my congressman.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

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The dog chewed up the stockings I left in her reach without care
And I’m hoping St. Nicholas will soon take her with him in the air.

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At Christmas time, there’ll be parties for hosting in my immaculately clean house. My joyfully jingle-belling children will make delightful decorations. There’ll be cookie baking and eggnog making, marshmallows for toasting and chestnuts for roasting. Loved ones will gather near, and hearts will radiate good cheer and glad tidings. It will truly be the most wonderful time of the year.

Psychiatrists have another term for such delusions, but I prefer to think of it as eternal optimism. My hopeful harvest will soon begin to wither, however, under the heat of seasonal expectations. I’ll turn to Martha for help, consulting her books for guidance. She will perch on my shoulder, a stylishly dressed angel of ambiance, whispering in my ear. Failure will not be an option. Some people excel at execution; others, like me, are dreamers, those for whom the best-laid plans of mice and Martha almost always go awry.

If tradition holds, Thanksgiving Day will dawn as gray and gelatinous as my gravy. My mistakes will be of the classic variety: the cranberries will quiver, and the beans and potatoes lie limp. The piecrusts will pucker, the meringue meander, the rolls run amok with assistance from my brawling brats. And old Tom Turkey, when pierced, will spurt ice-cold juices from the depths of his still-frozen interior.

My in-laws will leave with empty stomachs and wagging tongues, and my ruinous reputation will remain intact. By December, I’ll be walking on the dark side. We will burn the cookies and scald the eggnog. My formerly angelic offspring, their greed and wish lists growing with every commercial they watch, will grow cantankerous, shredding the decorations, tossing the tinsel and bashing each other with the bells. The dog will manage to knock over the Christmas tree almost every day. The gifts I have purchased will be hidden away so well that they are forgotten, and I will hurry out to buy more, wondering how I can be so disgustingly disorganized. My Christmas spirit will spring a leak.

Martha, now dressed in black – a Darth Vader of domesticity — will prod and nag and threaten until I am drowning in a sea of self-reproach. I will crumple under her pressure like ill-conceived origami, promising her the world. And still, she’ll want more. Peace and calm will give way to panic. I will suddenly have a much better understanding of the Grinch, and old Ebenezer Scrooge won’t seem like such a bad guy.

Yet, on Christmas Day, somewhere in the midst of all the un-Martha-like mayhem, I will be awakened early by the sharp poke of several young and eager fingers. Breathless voices still full of wonder, from children who don’t care that I’m not the queen of homemaking, will urge me to get up.“Mom,” they’ll whisper, “it’s Christmas!” And suddenly, nothing else will matter.

Later, we will gather at my in-laws, where the food is nauseatingly good. My kith and kin will promptly begin to bicker, in the crotchety, comfortable way only a close family can, over old insults and fresh resentments. Between mouthfuls, accusations will be hurled, political stances scorned and ethical standards questioned. Love will linger at its cranky, unvarnished best. And that’s a good thing.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007
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For every woman, there comes a bellwether moment when she realizes that all men are, indeed, created equal. Like it or not, she must face the fact that every male in her life is a walking testament to testosterone. From the time the first manlike creature crawled out of the primordial muck and used his newly developed hands to grab the remote and put up the toilet seat, it’s been the same. The bearers of the Y chromosome, those creatures unable to pick up socks or discard over-used underwear, are doomed to forever repeat hormonal history.

But mothers don’t tell this to daughters. In a conspiracy of silence designed to ensure the survival of the species, they allow girls to grow up blissfully ignorant, thinking their Y guys are different. That’s what I thought, years ago, when I found myself in a restaurant with my father and my new husband. I gazed fondly at these two men in my life. They were polar opposites in personality, and I loved them both.

Then along came a well-endowed woman in a low-cut blouse. As she walked past our table, my men’s heads whipped around in identical fashion and all four ogling eyeballs locked like missile radar on the ta-ta target. Shocked and angry, I attempted to get their attention, finally kicking them under the table.

“That woman could be a nuclear physicist, for all you know,” I said indignantly. “But you’re treating her like a sex object.”

Without missing a beat, my own dear father cracked, “If she’s a nuclear physicist, I’d like to see her reactors.”

Then the man I called Daddy and the man I called Darling made complete, er, boobs of themselves, high-fiving and breaking into loud, obnoxious guffaws.

Although disillusioned, I was determined to go on, and soon, I had a son. Somehow, I was convinced that I could change this boy’s genetic destiny, reverse the macho march of his life with my humanizing influence. And at first, it did seem to be working.

But then he entered puberty, and one day, I got a call from the middle school principal, who told me that the Neanderthal to whom I’d given birth was sitting in detention and whimpering about the agony in his nasal passages. On a dare and apparently trying to impress a nearby group of girls, he had snorted wasabi sauce, then run screaming through the halls swatting at his inflamed nose. This intelligent activity is apparently the highlight of a very popular movie named after a male donkey, which I think pretty much says it all.

Unfortunately, adolescent behavior in the human male extends far beyond the teen years. Take my husband, for example. He decided, after a mere 10 years of consideration, to get a vasectomy. Women can turn to other women for honest opinion and concerned counsel. Men, on the other hand, take great pleasure in throwing their friends into turmoil with derogatory comments designed to undermine a buddy’s manhood. This is a competitive instinct that evolved when primitive hunters had to battle each other for the meatier parts of the mastodon.

When a man undergoes a vasectomy, all his friends will deliver countless cutting remarks about the expected failure of his masculinity, assuring him his life as a he-man is history. My husband fell right into this pattern, but somehow still managed to go under the knife. I gave thanks that it was finally all over.

How wrong I was. The urologist who performed the procedure happened to have a son on the same soccer team as our son. Week after week, this highly educated descendent of Hippocrates would gather the other fathers on the sidelines to exchange jokes about the alteration of my husband’s nether regions, and my spouse would join right in.

They’d all slap each other on the back after every goofy gag and double over in laughter, endlessly amused in the same way that younger males never fail to find humor in their own bodily processes. It took a good year before we could get through a game without some reference to the silly snip and tuck. A woman could give birth to triplets, alone in the woods, with far less hullabaloo.

It was then I came to the estrogen-chilling realization that testosterone will always triumph. Women may be the bedrock of society, but men are the life of the party.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

“They’re going back!” the announcer tells us. Sweeter words were never spoken.

Last May, in the calm quiet of my house before my kids got home from school, I made a stupid decision. I decided that my little darlings needed a slacker summer. You know the kind of summer I mean – the kind that we had. An unstructured summer spent running through sprinklers, lying in tall grass deflowering dandelions, watching the Road Runner never fail to foil Wile E. Coyote.

I envisioned euphoric days where my children, their imaginations fired by boundless freedom, would write their own plays, rediscover the innocence of youth, perhaps dip into Tolkien or even Tolstoy (it could happen). I wanted them to savor their summer before it slipped away like a melting scoop of ice cream.

That was in May, when I clearly had too much time on my hands and would appear to have been smoking something.

In June, the bloom came off the rose just a bit. With school out, we went on vacation, enjoying round-the-clock togetherness as we attempted to bolster our family bonds while simultaneously blowing our budget. By the end of the month, our family bond had been bolstered to such an extent that it felt like an iron collar around our necks. My husband, his face wearing the liberated look of an escaped convict, went back to work.

But I, still deeply in a delusional phase, recommitted myself to giving my kids a season of sloth. I was determined that my fantasy of summertime fun and creativity, unencumbered by a schedule, would come to pass. Only it hasn’t gone quite as I planned.

Oh, my children have definitely been slothful. They’ve slept until noon, then stirred themselves just enough to move to the couch, where they somehow have summoned the energy to fight over the TV remote. And they have shown some true creativity there, managing — while still lying down — to punch, kick and bite each other without ever assuming a vertical position. It’s true they haven’t written any plays, but one of them did exhibit an artistic bent – and earn himself a morning of scrubbing toilets – by writing on my walls with ketchup. They have unfortunately not dipped into either Tolkien or Tolstoy, but they have read the words on Popsicle wrappers before tossing them on the table.

With the onset of August, the lazy days of summer have begun to really drive me crazy. My laconic teenage son – the one destined for a job as a comedian or possibly a member of Congress – tells me that his religion forbids any activity between sunup and sundown. I congratulate him on his faithful adherence to his faith. Even our Labrador seems nearly comatose in these dog days.

The other members of my lay-about lot are deeply involved in endless, banal bickering. They argue over the color of the sky or which one of them is the biggest brat (dead even, I’d say) or whether Mom or Dad has more wrinkles (wisely, they chose Dad). They’ve all become a bunch of hibernating bears, apparently storing up fat for the winter by barely moving. They’re even too weak, poor things, to feed themselves.

“Mom!” they will wail from the living room, where they have actually become part of the furniture and now require dusting. “We’re hungry! Can you bring us food?”

Fortunately, all this annoying inertia is about to end. They are, indeed, going back to school. And next summer, so help me, they’re going to camp.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

And since every other member of my family vehemently denies any responsibility for them, I can only conclude the troublesome towels themselves have staged a takeover.

Adams, who seems to have had something of an obsession with the things, claimed that towels have immense psychological value, providing a sense of order in a chaotic universe. There’s even an annual Towel Day. I believe all this adulation has given the heretofore humble towel an enlarged ego.

First, there is the fuss over folding. My towels have taken to appearing sans shape, even after being expertly folded by me. I know it was me because no one else in my family is apparently capable of the feat of folding. It’s a burden those of us born with greater abilities must bear. So I painstakingly fold the towels right out of the dryer. I give them crisp, comforting contours, and I place them lovingly on their assigned shelves.

And how do these ungrateful bolts of blotting material repay my hard work? By running rampant in my linen closet. If I open the closet door, I’ll find towels in a tumultuous state, hanging like hoodlums off the shelf or brazenly bunched up in the corner. Towels that earlier were well-behaved are suddenly mingling with sheets and pillowcases on unauthorized shelves. As neither my children nor my husband avows any knowledge of how they got there, I have to assume the terrible towels are in total revolt.

There’s also the matter of moisture. Our towels have a strange mania for mildew. They will leap off the hooks on which they have been faithfully hung after being used to dry off a humid (and hopefully clean) human. Then they will insist on lying unmoved for hours, amassing smelly spores and funky fungi. Sometimes, they will even fling themselves into closets and under beds where they will be unlikely to be discovered for days. By then, they’ll have hardened into crustily creative origami with little resemblance to their former folded finery. It’s truly diabolical.

The towels in my house adhere to a certain hierarchy. The lowest caste belongs to the torn, stained fragments of fabric consigned to sopping up spills or drying the dog. The middle class claims those ordinary, still-presentable if somewhat diminished, cloths assigned to dry the skins of their owners.

Then, at the top of the heap, are the elegant elite – the decorative towels. These privileged pieces – which even get matching, look-but-don’t-touch decorative soaps — have the enviable duty of simply looking good. No one is allowed to soil their softness with actual use.

And not one of my very compliant crew ever does touch them — I have their sworn statements – so the betrayal of these pretty, tulle-tied towels has been the hardest to bear. Instead of staying put in the guest bathroom, I find them lying, soaking wet, in the floor or in one or another sink. One time, I discovered them disgracefully hiding out on the back patio, where they evidently enjoyed cleaning a stinking pair of soccer cleats.

Another time, for some unknown reason, they chose to cover the hamster cage and, after a wild night of cavorting with our riotous rodent, they emerged frayed and chewed, half-naked and in serious need of rehab.

At this point, I am so traumatized by the behavior of my traitorous towels that I’m thinking of excommunicating the whole lot. We could probably get along fine without them. I’m sure that my above-suspicion family wouldn’t mind at all.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

This mighty mountain, named after the explorer Zebulon Pike, was one of the first landmarks seen by settlers as they made their way across the prairie. Many of them painted “Pike’s Peak or Bust” on their canvas wagons. We set out with a similar sense of adventure in our modern-day covered wagon. And while early pioneers had to contend with problems like hunger and disease, we faced our own challenges on the very first day.

For starters, there was the peril of parking. Mountains have an annoying lack of level space, and we were required to back into our assigned spot. To accomplish this task, my husband and I assumed the traditional vehicle-reversal gender roles – he stayed behind the wheel, gear in reverse and window down, while I stood outside ready to gently guide his efforts. But he pushed too hard on the gas, which caused me to screech “Stop!” which caused him to press too hard on the brakes, which resulted in a series of loud crashes inside the RV. This cycle was repeated over and over for about an hour, eventually degenerating into an ugly exchange that began with my mate questioning my navigational skills and ended with me snarling “Why don’t you learn how to drive?”

Then, determined to salvage our recreational experience, we began preparations to encounter nature, finally stepping into the great outdoors to hike. We were slathered in sunscreen, infested with insect repellent and, to ward off boredom, encumbered with a variety of electronic gadgets. Our children were armed with IPODs and, in case of battery failure, backup MP3s. Each of us carried a cell phone.

And my husband had his Blackberry, or as I affectionately call it, his Crackberry. He would obsessively check his signal strength, calling out the number of bars on the device in moods that ranged from ecstatic (“I’ve got five beautiful bars, baby!”) to dejected (“How can I only have one stinkin’ bar?”) as we followed the trail around the mountain. My spouse saw nothing of the glories of nature until nature took a hand and steered him into a tree.

“Put that silly thing away!” I snapped as he rubbed his bruised forehead. “We’re camping!” Reluctantly, he complied, slipping the portable pestilence into the holster on his belt.

The terrain grew steeper, dropping off precipitously on one side. The woods seemed to close in on us. Striding along in the lead, I thought of pioneer tales I’d read of attacks by packs of ravenous wolves. Then we came to a clearing, and I squinted into the blinding sun, barely able to see the trail. That’s when I looked into the furry face of death – a menacing form ahead, with pointy ears and, I could have sworn, a pair of fangs.

I did what any self-respecting woman would do.

“Wolf!” I screamed. “Wolf!”

And my man scrambled up the trail toward me, with every intention, I’m sure, of rescuing his damsel in distress. But suddenly, he stopped and swirled around, clutching at his waist. Just as I was undoubtedly about to be ripped to shreds by razor-sharp teeth, the one to whom I’d pledged my troth was frantically searching the ground for his fallen Blackberry.

Abandoned to my fate, I closed my eyes, but the satisfying sound of shattering plastic reached my ears. Then I felt a cold nose touch my hand. Nervously, I opened one eye and looked down at a friendly German Shepherd whose owners were just catching up to him. Noticing our ashen faces, they inquired for our welfare. I assured them we were fine. My spouse said not a word, only stared mournfully down at the broken pieces of his busted PDA on the rocks below. Then he glared at me.

“In the sun, it looked just like a wolf,” I stuttered, pointing at the dog now disappearing with his owners down the trail. “I’m sorry about your Crack…er…I mean Blackberry.” He just shook his head, too traumatized to speak.

After an appropriate period of mourning and after allowing our children, who’d collapsed in helpless laughter at their parents’ expense, to regain their composure, we headed back to our motor home in strained silence, having had quite enough nature for one day.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

It wasn’t always this way. I’ve received my share of those wonderful, irreplaceable gifts made by eager young hands: decorated pencil holders, picture frames studded with colored macaroni, the laminated footprints of a five-year-old, the I Love You Mommy mug. I remember the flowered, handmade apron I got one year and the artful collage created with canned food labels that left me guessing at the contents of my cans for weeks.

But with the approach of adolescence, when childlike sweetness sours a bit and honoring your mother can seem about as cool as elevator music, my well of homemade wonders suddenly ran dry. The holiday was conveniently forgotten until the last minute, and I’d end up holding a wilted bunch of hastily-purchased flowers and eating a pancake dinner at IHOP.

So this year, I’ve taken matters into my own hands. I wrote a list cleverly titled What I Want for Mother’s Day and put it on the refrigerator for everyone to see. Naturally, the list has been knocked off, stepped on, used to blot a spilled spot of jelly, but never, as far as I can tell, actually read. Even the dog, after determining that it was not edible, has ignored it.

Realizing a more direct approach was required, I recently gathered my loved ones around me – actually, I stood in front of the TV they were watching – and began to recite from my mom’s manifesto. I had to speak loudly to drown out the catcalls and boos coming from the crowd, but I bravely persisted:

What I Want for Mother’s Day

No. 1 — I want coffee brought to me in bed the moment I awaken. I do not want to have to get up and wake you all up to remind you that it is Mother’s Day. The coffee should be of the traditional strength and consistency. Not thick as Mississippi Mud like you made for me last year or the weaker-than-water stuff I got the year before. Begin practicing now. And with the coffee, I want chocolate – lots of it. Bring me chocolate in every form known to woman.

No. 2 – I want a temporary cessation of all maternal responsibilities. No cleaning, no cooking, no breaking up knock-down-drag-out fights, no toy repair, no toilet unclogging, not even any stuck-zipper zapping. I plan to take a very hot bath and read a very long book. And I will allow myself the luxury of using a brand-new bar of soap. Not once during this glorious bath will anyone interrupt me with “Hey Mom, where’s the sugar?” or “Did I mention I have a science project due tomorrow?”

No. 3 – After my bath, I want to have control of the television. THE TV – the 52-inch high-definition behemoth around which all the males in the house genuflect. No ESPN will appear on the TV that day. There will be no Victoria ’s Secret Specials. I will be watching every movie Brad Pitt ever made. I’ll probably also eat some more chocolate.

No. 4 — I’d like to be taken to dinner at a nice restaurant, one that requires an advance reservation and has no child’s menu. During the meal, I’d like my offspring to conduct themselves admirably. No eating with your fingers, no chewing with your mouth open, no kicking a sibling under the table. And not a single word about bodily processes.

No. 5 – After dinner, I’d like us all to go through family pictures together and reminisce about old times. You are required to look pleasant and appear to be having fun. Not even one teenage eye may roll in disgust. No surreptitious text messages may be sent to friends. And each one of you has to say “I love you, Mom,” and you have to mean it.

At that, several groans went up. I folded the paper and finished with something my Grandma used to say, something ungrammatical but undeniable.

“Just remember,” I told my gang. “If Mamma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

I’ll let you know how the Big Day goes.
© Jackie Papandrew 2007