Mother's Day Deconstructed

Please don't wake me up getting your father out of bed to help you cook "the" breakfast. I'm in the same bedroom and can hear you whispering and then you say to me, "Mom don't get up, go back to sleep." Easier said than done. Trust me.

The breakfast is planned like a culinary secret mission, as if they were flying to South America to pick the coffee beans and harvest the eggs from a free range farm. There are few things I don't like, but they seem to make my least favorite. I get pancakes, but this time they are buckwheat pancakes. Talk about a distinctive flavor. Were they trying to conjure days from long ago, pioneer days, pot belly stoves and log cabins or were they just concerned about my gluten intake?
Activities and food choices should reflect the honoree. I would like to go to a museum in NYC, and not on the suggested hike on a mountain side. My family forgot I have a fear of heights. MOMA and The Met would be delightful indulgences. We compromise and stay home.
I am told not to clean anything on this sacred day which is ludicrous, because I know what awaits me if I take the lazy approach. It will be a tornado of a mess that will surely anger me greatly the very next day. So I make the bed, do some laundry and straighten the living room. By midday my family has forgotten their no cleaning rule.
Conversations should be vetted. Having a conversation about finances is not the best choice for the day's topic, in fact it is quite possibly one of the worst. I want you to lie to me, save me the stress for the day. Today, if we must celebrate, I want to be blissfully ignorant. We can talk about payment due dates tomorrow when it's not my big day.
While lying around all day, I take a look at social media, and I get more annoyed. Posts on Facebook for the most part are competitive declarations detailing exactly how other mothers were made to feel special and loved. Everyone's family resembles June Cleaver's, the archetypal suburban family. Mine doesn't, so I'm a little concerned and I try not to compare. Logging off for the rest of the day.
I know I'm not a superhero and no one thinks I am, so I don't believe the Mother's Day hype the Hallmark cards propagandize. Thank me a little over time. If everyday could be Mother's Day, just a little bit, with an occasional thank you and an appreciative glance, I could be persuaded to enjoy my family fawning over me for one day. I may even learn to love pancakes.

My Imaginary Friends

I don't remember when they first popped up in my life, but I suspect I was about four years old.  My memories before kindergarten are few.  The family living room was the first room you entered as you came in the front door.  We lived in a two family house on the first floor, with my grandparents on the second floor.  They actually owned the home which was located on a busy avenue in a small New Jersey city.  My imaginary friends lived in the wall behind the front door. I would knock on the wall and press my face up against it trying to look through the painted sheet rock to catch a glimpse of their world. I guess I created Cooney, Chetty and Susan because I wanted someone to play with.  I was so ahead of my time creating the first virtual play date.  Usually when asked if they wanted to play, Susan was most times the only one who could, because Chetty and Susan were always going to Florida and leaving Susan home.  I felt bad for her.  We would dance for hours in the living room, doing fabulous stunts off of the hassock looking at ourselves in the wall of mirrors my parents had installed at the time.  That was the style in the 70's.  We had an entire wall of mirror tiles with a crackle film overlay.  So hip!  Oh, don't dare get your fingerprints on them though as you would hear the wrath of my mother.  It was one of the many things that ticked her off.  I remember running over to the half wall in between the dining room and the kitchen as my father and mother were seated finishing dinner, telling them tales of my friends and them just sitting there chewing and nodding their heads as if this was normal and just fine with them.  I was friggin' crazy and they let me go with it.  Can't recall when my friends disappeared and we stopped playing together, but I have yet to doubt their existence.  I wonder why I named them these crazy names for the most part.  I mean Susan is mainstream, but Cooney and Chetty? Experts would say children develop imaginary friends to help deal with change or times of transition.  Maybe subconsciously I knew that my life would change soon, sort of a sixth sense, because up until this point I think we were happy as a family.  Again my memories at this age and younger are sparse.  All I do know is they were comforting to me, like a blankie or stuffed animal.