Helen

A few summers ago, like maybe fifteen or sixteen, I was rock climbing with my sister on a little escarpment not far from our rented house in Jackson, Wyoming. If it wasn't her first time climbing, it was pretty close, and she was understandably a little nervous as she got pretty high off the ground and the foot- and hand-holds became fewer and farther between. She was dealing with her sense of unease by talking a mile a minute, mostly about how I didn't have very good ideas and it was about time she stopped subscribing to my version of fun. Then she suddenly relaxed and called down, "Hey, that's more like it! Major bucket hold." She reached up and repositioned herself well enough to smile, look down at me and ask, "Was Mom up here with a chisel?"

That's the kind of mom we have; if there was any way to make things more fun or successful for her kids, she'd find it, and then she'd do it and then slink out of the way so we'd discover later the warm corn muffins for the first day of seventh grade (when I insisted I was old enough to get myself ready), or the cookies on the table after school, or my favorite vegetarian submarine sandwich at the meat-laden after-graduation party. Helen never missed a little league or soccer game or a track or ski meet, unless we wanted her to. She'd have refreshments for the whole team and scream so loudly from the stands that I once stopped at second base on an easy triple, too mortified to get any closer to my otherwise very classy mom's adrenaline-activated gutter mouth.

Every time I adjusted the passenger side mirror for her, the resulting angle was The Best It's Ever Been. Even when I was thirty-five, just before she sold the last vehicle without automatic mirror controls.

I have a new perspective on all that mothering now that I'm a mom myself. It seems so easy, in 2008, to slip into a form of over-the-top self-congratulatory motherhood. The parenting magazines I read at the dentist's office are full of birthday party ideas and decorating tips for children's bedrooms and easy meals the family will love. The selling point of all these offerings is that they'll make me the coolest mom ever if I do them and I will be thanked and admired and envied. My kid might even be thanked and admired and envied, mostly for having a mom as cool as me. I get sucked into it myself; at lunch today I did my fancy spiral-ketchup trick for Cliffy's Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick and handed it to him saying, "Do you have a cool mom, or what?" He obliged me, but the mildly pathetic aspect of the exchange didn't escape me. If I was really that cool, I could wait until he comes home from college, or becomes a parent, or is writing a Mothers' Day blog entry when he's thirty-eight to get my kudos.

If my mom knew, or cared, how much my friends and my sibling's friends adored her, she shrugged it off. If she was bringing snacks, it was because she thought someone might be hungry. She didn't really care what our bedrooms looked like, provided there was adequate ventilation and no rotting food. She never would have thought to take her friends to see what she'd "done" with the kids' rooms. She did occasionally worry that we'd attract the attention of the child welfare agencies if we insisted on wearing our favorite worn-beyond-patching blue jeans or refused to wear a jacket on a chilly spring day, but short of that, the opinion and counsel of the outside world had little bearing on her plans. We hung out together and she helped us with our lives, short term and long.

Helen has also appeared with her metaphorical chisel in my life, and the creamery's life, more times than I can count. When I volunteered to paint the house I was renting in South Royalton, she came to my rescue with her ladders, paint brushes and trim saw when the project started to involve siding and got over my head. Since we've had the creamery, she has delivered ice cream in her van on the way back home after a visit, met me at events to watch the kids and sewed a felt banner so we'd have something with our name on it when we debuted the ice cream. She even put on a hairnet and ran the bottlewasher when we were short of help. She stayed for a few weeks after each of the kids was born, doing whatever she could to make the house, family and farm keep moving, whether it was cooking supper, reading to the older kids, tending the garden or raking field 19.

You get the idea. My mom wrote the book on Being There For Us. Every day of my life, I have known that my mom was cheering for me, eager to hear about whatever is going on. That's a pretty big thing to have in the back of your head, and it tends to make a person take on more challenges than one might otherwise. Like marrying a dairy farmer or having four kids in six years.

So thanks, Mom, for making all this possible. You set a pretty high standard that I try every day to live up to (minus the swearing from the sidelines). It's a tall order, but I don't really have a choice; a foundation of love like this is something you build on.