Not So Common Sense

"Our Mother's Day speaker at church this morning was a 90-year-old woman," I remarked at lunch with our son's family.

"Ninety years old!" exclaimed 7 year-old Joy, her eyes widening in wonder. "She must have growed big!"

"No, actually, she grew shorter," I laughed, thinking about the spunky, tiny lady. "The longer she stands, the shorter she grows," I quipped, then remembering the old riddle about the candle, I finished, "Little Miss Eticoat, In her pink petticoat, and her red nose. The longer she stands, The shorter she grows."

Why do these submerged fragments of childhood, either my own or my children's, pop into my mind? Like on Saturday when the whole family had piled into cars for an outing to take a walk at Cann Gardens. To distract the children, who had been running a little wild, our daughter-in-law organized them and adults alike to play a game of "Mother, May I?" My husband and I were watching from benches on the shady brick terrace where they played.

"Mother, may I take 3 giant steps?" one asked, to which she said, "Yes, you may." After awhile of this pattern, the game was getting a little lackluster, so I made a suggestion that had just occurred to me.

"You have to say, 'Take three giant steps,' then they have to say, 'Mother, may I?' If they forget, they have to go back to the starting line." Suddenly this added new energy to the game, if I do say so myself, as the players invariably forgot to ask permission and laughed in surprise each time they had to go back and start over.

As we were leaving the park later, one of the little girls was balking, dragging along being half-pulled by her mother. "Let her be a wheelbarrow," I heard myself saying, showing her mom how to take hold of the child's feet while her energetic daughter walked on her hands in front of her. Beth, 5, loved the activity, and her sister came running, flinging herself on the ground to be turned into a wheelbarrow, too! Thanks, Mimi!

Back to our speaker. "My husband had to get up to go to work at 4:00 a.m," she recalled, "and I would get up earlier to make his breakfast. Then I couldn't get him up!" She told how she would call and call, getting frustrated, day after day. Then one morning, reaching down and picking up his socks, she put them on his feet. "Then he got up!" she exclaimed, "So I did that every morning, and he came down to breakfast every time!"

She said later, her three boys would not get up for school, no matter how she called up the stairs to wake them. "You know what I did?" she asked, "I would go in, rub their backs, tell them how much I loved them and what fine boys they were, and say, 'Breakfast is on the table. Come and eat.' And they got up! I would do this every morning, saving myself a lot of frustration!"

"I told my friend about that," she went on, "and she said she wouldn't stoop to put a man's socks on for anything! I told her I didn't have to do it; it was an act of love, and he responded in love and went to work!"

Words of wisdom from mothers (or grandmothers), whether profound or light-hearted, are good on Mother's Day or any day!