Your Mama

When you think of your mom, what picture pops up in your head? Mom doing something silly? Mom in her business suit with a big smile for you at the end of a day in daycare? Mom on the top of a mountain? Or maybe mom in her bathrobe, not looking too happy, when you got home a couple hours past curfew (and with a suspicious odor about you)??

 Sometimes when I think about my mom, I picture the back of her head. That’s because, with 7 kids, I was always in the backseat of the station wagon, windows down, going to the big “new” Stop & Shop in Framingham or, better yet, headed to the beach (Lake Maspenock) with a Tupperware crate full of peanut butter and fluff sandwiches.

Other times I think of Mom, sleepy and with red eyes, getting out of bed at 3pm when we got home from school. That’s because she went back to work when I was 10, doing the 11pm to 7am shift at the hospital. It didn’t take us long to learn that if you asked Mom for something while she was “resting” she almost always said yes...

The Girl Scouts asked me to tell skirt readers about their Mother’s Day photo gallery, and to submit pics of their moms. Look here: http://www.girlscoutseasternmass.org/ under the hand-drawn mother’s day card on the right side of the page.

Here’s a photo of a great mother-daughter team: our photographer Shannon Power, right, and her daughter, who obviously aspires to be like her mom (with good reason).

 When I got the request I looked around my cube at the photos I keep of my daughters. There are more than a few, but I’m always the one behind the camera. So, I ‘ve got the rest of the family in Times Square, the rest of the family in front of the Louvre, the rest of the family in front of a giant ficus in Sydney... no trace of me!

That really makes me wonder how my kids will picture me in the future. Maybe I’ll be the faceless mom holding a camera up and yelling “stop fooling around and smile!”