Occasionally, on Sunday nights, the phone will ring and I’ll expect to hear my Mom’s voice on the other end of the line. In my mind’s eye, she’s chain-smoking and drinking iced tea and talking a mile a minute about the latest book she’s just read. The reality is, it’s been 16 long years since her passing, 16 years since she called to tell me what she was reading. My mother devoured books the way she devoured life, in big, indiscriminate gulps. Married at 18, a mother at 19 with five children before her 26th birthday, reading was her passion, her escape, her tonic. She was never without a book. I can remember as a very young child she would load up the five of us, plus assorted neighbor kids, for a trip to a Bayfront Park a few blocks away. While this barefoot tribe of urchins marauded around, screaming, yelling, wading, unsupervised into the water, Mom never lifted her head from whatever book she’d disappeared into. As an impressionable child of the ‘60s who always had her nose in a book of her own, I longed for a homemaker mom like Caroline Ingalls, from Little House on the Prairie, or Trixie Belden’s mom, or even Marmee, from Little Women. My mom was like none of these saintly models of patience and virtue. I don’t remember a time she didn’t work outside the house. She didn’t play tennis or bridge, didn’t garden or do volunteer work. She was a great cook but an apathetic housekeeper. Mom was tart-tongued, the disciplinarian in the family who, on family vacations, could reach back from the passenger seat of our station wagon, and smack all five of us across the knees with her flip-flop without looking up from her book. Mom and I were alike in some ways. I definitely inherited her love of reading and storytelling. But we were different in so many others. I had stubbornly decided that when I had my own children, I’d do the exact opposite of whatever she’d done. No sugary drinks! No TV on school nights! And definitely, no running around the neighborhood barefoot and unsupervised all summer long. How much time did I waste cataloging all the things she’d done wrong instead of appreciating and celebrating the fact that she was just the kind of mom a kid like me needed: a mom who allowed middle school me to stay up all night on a school night, reading Gone with the Wind in one big gulp, stretched out in the bathtub with a rolled-up towel for a pillow. The kind of mom who never censored my reading, including that time I chose Lady Chatterley’s Lover as the topic for a high school term paper. And yes, the kind of mom who greenlit my desire to go to college, to study journalism, to be a writer—and who never doubted I would become a published author. If you’re reading this today, and you’re lucky enough to talk to your mom or to a mother figure in your life, do me a favor: Think about the ways she got this mothering thing right. Ponder the ways she passed along the best of herself and shared it with you. Let her know how she gave you just what you needed, even if you didn’t know it at the time. When my first book, Every Crooked Nanny, was published in 1992, I gave my protagonist, Callahan Garrity, a sidekick, who happened to be her mother. Edna Mae, named after my maternal grandmother, was a not-so-thinly veiled version of my own mom, right down to the towering bouffant hairdo. Callahan and Edna spun off seven more mysteries in that series, and every time I sat down to write one of those books, I had to fight to keep Edna from taking over every scene she appeared in. Mom, of course, was delighted to have a co-starring role and thought nothing of showing up at a book signing event in my hometown and offering to sign right alongside me. Sixteen years ago, I called my parents to share the amazing news that Hissy Fit, my 13th published novel, had made the New York Times bestseller list. It was a first for me. Mom took the news calmly. “I knew it,” she announced. “I knew this book would be the one.” For the next six weeks, Mom (and Dad) dined out on the big news, announcing to everyone they encountered that their daughter was a New York Times bestselling author. And then, one night as she was finishing up a hand of solitaire and getting ready to go to bed (with a book), she suffered a massive heart attack and, as her doctor told us, “was dead before she hit the floor.” Grieving her loss doesn’t stop. But one small consolation for me is that my mom lived long enough to see me achieve my dream. She got to see how her own love of reading and storytelling was manifested in me. And of course, she got to say, “I told you so.” God, how she loved to say that! This week marked the publication of my 29th novel. The Newcomer—about a young woman named Letty who flees to Florida with her young niece after the murder of her sister—didn’t start off as an ode to motherhood. After all, Letty never intended to be a parent. But sometimes, we find our calling in unexpected places. What unexpected roles have you found yourself in? Have you had to fake it ‘til you made it? To sink or swim? How brave or strong have you found yourself to be when being strong or brave was your only choice? Someday, I hope my children will judge me to be half as good at the job of mothering as my mom was. That while far from a cross between June Cleaver and Mother Theresa, I did the best I could for the family I raised. The role of mom, whether expected or unexpected, can never be played the same way twice—and it can never be duplicated. This Sunday, as we honor mothers and mother figures of all stripes, let’s do so with humility and forgiveness. If you’re a mother yourself—or a surrogate mom—worried about all the ways you’re failing to live up to society’s model of a super-mom, give yourself some grace. And if your own mom is imperfect—because of course, she is; we all are—perhaps you can extend some understanding, too. Let’s choose to see the good and to honor those who put in the hard work of showing up, whether or not that bears any resemblance at all to our idealized notions of “the perfect mom”—whatever that is. Next, check out 2021 book releases to read. Friends & Fiction is an online community, weekly live web show, and podcast founded and hosted by bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Patti Callahan Henry, and Mary Alice Monroe, who have written more than 90 novels between them and are published in more than 30 languages. Catch them and their incredible author guests live every Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET on the Friends & Fiction Facebook group page or their YouTube Channel. Follow them on Instagram and, for weekly updates, subscribe to their newsletter. Mary Kay Andrews is the New York Times bestselling author of 29 novels, including HELLO, SUMMER, SUNSET BEACH and THE NEWCOMER, out May 4 from St. Martin’s Press. She is a founding member of Friends & Fiction. A recovering newspaper reporter, she divides her time between Atlanta and Tybee Island, Georgia. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and at MaryKayAndrews.com.
