67

Next week I hit a milestone — sixty-seven trips around the sun. Birthdays tend to make us look forward, count candles, and joke about getting older. But I’ve always thought it odd that we don’t stop each year and look back — all the way back to the person who was there the moment we arrived. Our mothers were present for every single one of our first birthdays, even if we don’t remember it.

So before I mark this next one, I want to pause and tell you about my mom.

There’s a scene in the 1941 movie Dumbo. The mother elephant, locked away, reaches through the bars and cradles her baby with her trunk while singing:

Baby mine, don’t you cry
Baby mine, dry your eyes
Rest your head close to my heart
Never to part
Baby of mine

I choke up every time. It might sound silly, but I understand that feeling. To be held, protected, and loved without condition, even when life puts bars between you. If this is the last column I ever write about my mother, then let it be said plainly: that is what it felt like to be her son. And it was glorious.

She was born in the Depression, the youngest of six in a Manhattan railroad apartment — seventeen years between her and her oldest sister. Her father drove a bus, her mother stayed home, sometimes keeping her home from school just for company. One of her favorite stories was waiting on the stoop for her brother to return from WWII. They didn’t know the day he’d arrive — but her mother believed some moments are more important than attendance sheets.

Another memory she cherished: her brother arriving late from Army leave to her school Christmas play. The nuns stopped the show and restarted it for him. She told that story with her fourth-grade pride still shining all these years later.

Her mother died when she was eleven. She stayed in that small apartment with her father and brother — and at that same age, she met the boy who would become her husband. He joined the Army and eventually guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington. She traveled to D.C., chaperoned by her aunt and brother, just to watch him march in solemn honor.

She married at twenty-one and became a mother at twenty-three. A daughter followed two years later. Like so many women of her era, she poured her energy into her family. She kissed, she lectured, she believed fiercely in her children. When a nun doubted her son’s abilities, she made the long trip to the convent to set the record straight.

She cooked breakfast and dinner, made Halloween costumes, and sat up at 3 a.m. after nightmares. In winter, she heated the kitchen oven so her kids could dress in front of the open door. She carried a photo of the neighbor who had never come home from the war — Flip Finnigan — holding her as a young girl. She once dreamed of being a nurse, and instead poured that ambition into her children.

Then came illness — Multiple Sclerosis — early and unforgiving. Her body weakened, but her spirit didn’t. She lived to see her children grow, graduate, marry, and become parents. She did not get the time she deserved with her grandchildren, and she never met her great-grandchildren. Of all the hardships she endured, that is the one I believe she would have regretted most.

She was one of millions of remarkable mothers, but to us she was singular. And though I write often, I rarely wrote about her. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I could almost hear her asking, “When do you tell my story?”

So here it is, Mom.

As I celebrate sixty-seven years on this earth, I’ll raise a silent toast to the woman who made trip number one with me — who held me close, fought nuns, warmed winter kitchens, and loved without measure.

Thanks for having me, Mom.