A lot of fireworks over mothers today and I don't mean just the cards and the flowers and the presents. Lots of self analysis and remembering of things that went wrong and of things that went right and I've thought of writing something myself. And I'm not sure what that would be and whether that's good or bad. I wonder if this relationship with your mother business has a generational aspect, certainly it matters whether you were a daughter or a son.

My mother was one of five children, so I had her two brothers' and her two sisters' families to know and watch in addition to my own. I wouldn't have thought of it in this way when I was growing up, which is why I say maybe it's a generational thing, since nobody I knew talked about this kind of thing or compared their own family relationships with the family relationships of others until I was in my twenties. Think about what we had as role models in the 1950's: Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. I was seventeen when the pop hit Sixteen Candles hit the charts. Sixteen Candles and self analysis are an oxymoron. We were oxymorons. Did that describe what my life was about? My relationship with my mother? Ozzie and Harriet? Sixteen Candles? Father Knows Best? Maybe. I guess. Certainly I can remember smoking dope and watching old Ozzie and Harriet reruns when I was in my 30's on cable. They made sense when you were stoned. Maybe they made sense to me in the 50's when I first saw them.

My father took a little more aggressive attitude toward life than old Ozzie. (Which was fine. He was the father and he did what fathers were supposed to do. He always remembered Mother's Day at the last moment, come to think of it, but that was all right. I'd ride with him to the nursery or the flower shop. He ran late, but he delivered on time.) And my mother was somewhat more passive than Harriet, but what the hell. Ozzie and Harriet, Dagwood and Blondie, the underlying thread played the man as a nebbish and the woman as the power behind the throne. There was truth in that, but there were many truths in every family relationship, what mattered was the emphasis each received and describing the mix I grew up with in terms that others might understand, I don't know, I'm not sure I can.

I remember not only the words, but the silences. I don't think people talked all that much about what really mattered to them in that generation. I was pretty much on my own during my teenage years, there really weren't any important questions that I could ask my mother and get a response, but then, that was all new to me and I was dumb enough and young enough I didn't even know you could ask or that there might be answers she could have given. My sister was more rambunctious. I suspect she would tell a very different story. Same parents, very different reality, very different experience.