Shadiest crap ever

So the Saturday before Mother's Day my mom busts into my bedroom at 8:30 a.m. with a piece of paper in her hand. (One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was giving Mom a key to my house, which she never uses when my husband is in town but which she will often use when he is gone, to let the dog out or otherwise assist me while I am at work, etc. [Having just written and re-read that, I guess giving her a key is not such a mistake after all, but anyway.])

She puts the paper in my groggy little hand; it is an advertisement for a Mother's Day essay contest being held by a local beauty salon. Write an essay about how great your mother is, win lots of nice prizes including a spa day, lunch for two, gift certificate to a jewelry store, what have you. The bottom of the ad reads, "Must be 21 and older."

I am a fairly decent writer (I do so for a living), and I do enjoy my mother, and since I am confident that I will not be competing with some crayon-scrawled missive written by a cute kid, I decide to enter the contest.

Mom finds out yesterday that a 14-year-old won the contest; Mom asks the beauty shop owner how this is possible if the contest was only open to entrants over 21 years of age. Response: "The mother is the one who has to be 21." I take significant issue with this "clarification":

(1) Is it really necessary to codify such a rule? If you are a 21-year-old mother, your kid might be -- at most -- five or six. If a five- or six-year old can write a persuasive essay on his mother, just give the prizes to him. Because that's remarkable, and that five-year-old deserves a spa day. However, chances are, the child of a 21-year-old mother is no older than an infant or toddler. In which case a strong grasp of the English language and the motor skills necessary to write with a crayon are most likely still lacking.

(2) Are there really so many young mothers in our small town who have substantially-advanced and articulate infants that would participate in a relatively unpublicized contest at a small beauty salon so as to make such a rule necessary?

(3) I never would have entered a contest where I had to compete with teenagers. It's like that episode of "Seinfeld" where Kramer bests children at karate. I feel quite sheepish about the whole thing.

All of which leads to the obvious: the rule was originally created to level the playing field, but the beauty shop owner had a winner in mind and was forced to "clarify" her rule at the last minute. Thinking that nobody would figure it out. But, as Judge Judy says, don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining. It's not that I need the prizes or the "glory." I just hate being lied to, and I hate when people assume that I won't figure out their idiocy.

The fix is in.

So, anyway, I hereby "publish" my essay on Mom. Because being blogged about is even better than winning a spa package.

++++++
Mother’s Day Essay Contest
Written for Mom, by Me

It is commonly thought of as a horrifying fact of life that, eventually, we all turn into our mothers. A corollary to this horrifying fact is the exceedingly horrifying fact that, indeed, our mothers are always right. Nobody ever wants to admit these truths, but, alas, they are as certain as death and taxes. If you’re lucky, you can suffer these realities with a smile of respect and admiration for the woman who gave birth to you – with no small measure of love, reserved for the times when she isn’t criticizing or telling you what to do. If you’re really lucky, however, you can embrace these realities and be grateful that you’re turning into your mother who is, by the way, always right. I am lucky enough to fall into that latter category; I have hit, so to speak, the mother lode: I get to be as cool as Carol and I am right all the time!

Wicked.

I fought it long and I fought it hard – no way are you right on this one, Mom, you’re crazy! – but with each passing year it becomes a little clearer that whatever advice she gives, whatever assessment of a life trauma she offers, whatever criticism she levels at my inane behavior…correct, all of it. Correct, correct, correct. The truth of the matter is, accepting her Supreme Knowledge of All Things has set me free. It’s hard to worry about things, because she tells me everything is going to be OK. And since she’s always right, everything will be OK. From the mundane to the extraordinary, she has yet to prove me otherwise.

Like the time not too long ago that, against my lazy and pathetic protestations that I didn’t want to put in a garden this summer, she forced me to come to her house, divide her hostas and transplant them to my own perennial-bed-in-the-making. I whined and complained the whole time. I even injured my foot on the shovel because in my stubbornness I chose not to wear my gardening shoes. (She brought me the peroxide as I sat on the front lawn. Another sign of a quality mother: no matter her age and the condition of her arthritis, she is the one who runs to the medicine cabinet while you sit in the grass with a teeny tiny cut.) And you know what? The following day, as I considered the beautiful hosta garden taking shape in my own backyard, I had to admit that she was right. Once again. I did want to garden this summer. Mom, let’s go to Petitti’s!

Or the time I woke up to my beloved puppy, Jet, having a seizure on the floor next to my bed. Kicking wildly, foaming at the mouth, staring at me with a blank, expressionless eye that I was certain indicated her imminent passing. I did not then understand that it was a seizure; I truly did think she was dying. (To fully appreciate Jet’s importance, one must realize that when she was six months old my husband and I commissioned a portrait of her that hangs in our living room. Jet is, therefore, exempt from the sort of ugliness that dooms the rest of us mortals: she will not, cannot, ever get sick or, heaven forbid, pass away. She exists on some alternate plane of eternal dogs.)

Jet came of out the seizure just fine, and resumed her morning canine activities such as crying for her breakfast. I called Mom in a raving, sobbing, weeping mess. What she told me is the sort of advice that really only comes with age, the kind of wisdom that mothers dispense but that 32-year-olds ignore until they live for a few more decades and figure it out for themselves, only to slap themselves on the forehead and exclaim, my mother used to tell me this all the time!: life is not perfect. People are not perfect. Dogs are not perfect. You do not know what is going to happen next. It could be joyous, it could be heartbreaking. Whatever it is, it is going to happen, and it will all be OK. In the meantime, just love. Love Jet. Appreciate her. Appreciate those around you. Never leave angry. Never take anything for granted. Keep it in perspective. Take it with grace and everyone will be just fine.

I try each day to live her advice. Sometimes it’s hard because I am still mostly a young uptight thing who has more bratty days than I’d like. But each day that I wake up and Jet is a happy, non-seizuring girl, I am grateful. Each day that I have a loving family around me is another day when I count my blessings. I strive to acquire prematurely Mom’s wisdom of age. As they say, youth is wasted on the young. Mom inspires me to belie that aphorism.

She also inspires me to drink vodka and smoke the odd cigar, but that is another story entirely.