Part 1

I hated my mother. I hated the brown, cracked patches of skin on her heels. Every afternoon she sat on the living room sofa in her white, nylon slip and watched "General Hospital." Her feet sat in a dishpan of warm water that started out white and foaming and ended up murky and brown like her hair.

I watched her scrape the dead, white skin from her heels with the straight edge of the scissors she was holding. Flakes fell onto the bubbly surf and landed like piles of dirty snow. I stared at her and wondered what she saw in those pretend lives on the screen. I wondered how she lived with those ugly feet. Her baby toe curled over the next one. This was a problem, she said, that was caused by wearing shoes that were too narrow when she was a child. I said it was genetic. I longed to have her turn and talk to me, yet I avoided her eyes, I was afraid she would ask me to empty the pan of water and I couldn't bear to touch it.

I hated my mother, especially her voice --the fish wife/truck driver combination that shouted obscenities at the paperboy for failing to make the porch. Once she hit me across the face because I had used the word "pregnant." I asked how pregnant she was...when was she due to have my brother. I was not suppose to say the word "pregnant."  I hated the way she looked at me with her startled brown eyes and made the mouth--the mouth that made me tell the truth about my father's drinking.

"Where did you and your father go?"

"To the ice cream parlor."

"Then where?"

"We came home."

"Where else did you go? I can stand anything but liars; I can't stand liars. Did he stop off somewhere?"

"Yes," I answer her. But I can hear the slurred words of my father say, "Now when we get home, your mother'll ask you where you've been. You don't have to tell her we went to Billy's Bar. Just tell her about the ice cream."

"Yes," I say to her again.

"Where? At Billy's Bar?"

"Yes." I always told my mother the truth and always betrayed my father (later I  knew he was an alcoholic).

I hated my mother's insistence on serving everyone; "Mimi," she called herself. She bustled about and barked orders in the kitchen, wanting perfection and never getting it; it was my father's fault or mine. "Fred, didn't I tell you to take the turkey out!" "Fred, where's the applesauce?" "Carolyn, do I have to remind you of everything?" I can smell her work--apple and mincemeat pies, Italian cookies made with figs --I can never remember her sitting down to eat them.

I hated my mother's preoccupation with herself. She always assumed she was dying. Everyday she asked me to check the back of her head for signs of cancer. "Is that mole black or brown? How big is it?" My mother asked about the new pimple on her back. "Touch it," she asked, "see if it moves... or if it's hard." I hated looking; I hated touching her. But she was stubborn.

Part 2

My mother had breast cancer and refused to let go of life, even when death was imminent. I suggest she "get her house in order" and she bought mauve carpeting. She wanted to talk about life after life--seeing a light at the end of some tunnel. But I didn't believe in lights or tunnels. I didn't listen. She stopped talking about it. She gave me a ring, one I had always admired, and not knowing what else to do, I offered her a drink of water. With that familiar startled look in her eyes, she made the mouth and drank the water because I gave it to her.

Her hospital bed was in front of her living room window. The television was unusually silent, my father's baseball games now relegated to the bedroom. Hospice nurses washed my mother's shrunken body and admired the soft, translucent skin on her feet. "Yes," I reflected back, "translucent skin." But inside I rejected the idea that those were my mother's feet. My mother's feet are brown, rough and callused from waiting on tables in shoes that didn't fit--shoes that made her little toe curl over the next one. My mother's body was not frail. Her bones didn't crack like spiders beneath your feet when she rolled over. No, she farted strong, loud farts like a good old broad. When she was angry or tired or frustrated she would swing her right arm like McGwire's bat making a direct hit to my left cheek.

My mother is called Mimi, perpetual movement with foghorn snores, wearing auburn hair and two breasts. She is a 70-year-old who works fulltime and fights for a seat on a carousel ride. She is an anxious, depressed warrior, a voting democrat who campaigns for republicans, a self-proclaimed coward who battles through unbelievable pain to live, and a believer in life ever after who is afraid to die of breast cancer. I know now that is how I will remember my mother.

Part 3

Her posed body lays pain free now. I kneel down next to her and silently inquire how she is doing. I wonder about the tunnel and the light that she asked me about once when she laid dying. There is no startled look, there is no mouth, there is no answer. My daughter tells me to rub her knee, something that soothed her in the days she could breathe. "But I never did it right," I say to my daughter. "She said I never did it like you." Still, I reach in the casket under the cloth barrier to try, frightened of what I might feel, frightened that she might sit up and tell me I'm still not doing it right. I could not bear to feel that sting on my cheek today.

But this is not my mother. My mother is counting her tip money on the side of her bed. There, in a white nylon uniform with a flowered handkerchief fanned out in the pocket, she carefully stacks then wraps nickels, dimes and quarters to pay for the dance lessons that I love. Once--once, she called me her shining star and we cried together. I love my mother. I hate it that my mother's dead; I hate that most of all.