Mother’s Day, and iced tea

It’s my first Mother’s Day without my mom. And yes, it feels empty and meaningless.

I get it that it still means a lot to a lot of people, and I don’t begrudge the world for that.

It’s just, to me, a day that couldn’t go by too quickly.

Growing up, every day was Mother’s Day. Oh, yeah, I was a momma’s boy, definitely.

My mom was everything to me, my role model, my biggest cheerleader.

She was the one who had me sign up for little league baseball, for one thing, and took me to the games, because my dad wasn’t a sports guy, didn’t care, wasn’t really a part of my life even when he was, but that’s another story for another day, and one that I don’t like getting into much, because I learned long ago that you don’t get too far focusing on the negative.

Positive part of my childhood was my mom also serving as my dad and taking me to my baseball games. Keep in mind, she couldn’t see all that well at night, so driving home after games wasn’t easy, but we were up and down the roads up and down the Valley all spring and half the summer.

My baseball career went on hiatus in my teen years when it became apparent that I couldn’t hit a curveball.

But now I’m back, working as a color commentator on ESPN3 college baseball broadcasts.

This happened after mom passed away last September. After every game, I have an instinct to pick up the phone and call her to ask her what she thought of how I did. Because she’d have watched, and she’d have given me an honest appraisal, good, bad or indifferent.

Like when I got thrown out trying to steal second base to end a game in little league, and my competitive fires stoked, I left the field in tears, unable to process that I had, in my mind, cost my team the game.

Mom, in the car on the way home, made it clear to me that would never happen again.

Then there was the time, later that same season, actually, that she saw the left fielder for the Sherando team run into the fence down the line trying to catch a foul ball.

“That little idiot just knocked himself out trying to catch that damn ball,” she said, before realizing that the little idiot in question was her little idiot.

Mom did her best Dale Sr. impression to get me to the hospital for treatment for a concussion and whatever else got scrambled in there.

In addition to keeping the roads hot during baseball season, I got mom volunteered to serve as the president of the Parent Teacher Group at my elementary school in Crimora. I did this by signing her up to have her make cookies for some event or the other that the PTG was putting on when I was in third grade.

I remember telling her about how I’d volunteered her for this one day after school. About how the event was the next day, and they only needed a few dozen, you know, no big deal.

Mom, being my mother, chewed me out, but she baked cookies into the night, and from there she served as the president of the PTG until the school closed after I’d gone on to high school.

I learned from that lesson the value of pitching in and helping out, and do plenty of it to this day, though nothing involving me baking cookies.

I rarely even eat cookies anymore. It’s just not the same. Her preacher cookies were the best, and between those and her peanut butter cookies, I’d be running 20 miles a day to keep the weight off, but damn they were good.

I digress.

This running thing came up as my mom was dying of cancer. She left us way, way too soon. I told her about how I was training for a marathon last fall, and assumed that she’d not only live to see me run that first one, but many others.

I’m getting ready to run the New York City Marathon, one of the more prestigious marathons in the world. I know my instinct crossing the finish line is going to be to want to call her to tell her how I did. That’s what I thought when I crossed the finish line in Richmond last November.

She wasn’t perfect, but even in that she had an influence on me. After my dad, who passed away in 2008, left her and left our family when I was 13, mom went through a wild phase. I was old enough to not approve of some of (OK, any of) the guys that she dated, but there was a silver lining, in that she dropped my sister and I off with her parents most weekends, and I got to be close to them in a way that made it so that I came to think of myself as having an extra set of parents.

They’re both gone now, too, and it might sound odd to say, but I think of both of them in a motherly way. Granny, for obvious reasons, but my granddaddy, too, who I learned had been sent with his siblings to an orphanage when he was 10 or 11, and as the oldest became the glue that kept his brothers and sisters together as much as he could.

He’s who I learned the value of hard work from. Granny is who I inherited the gift of gab from. She’d see me today and send me home with a cheesecake because I’m too skinny.

Mom, for her part, would act all stoic about it all, but then I’d hear from folks about how much she loved bragging about her son and how well he was doing.

She had every right to feel that she deserved the opportunity to brag. She raised two kids by herself. Remember when the minimum wage was $3.35 an hour? That’s what we had, and we survived some weeks on ketchup sandwiches, but it could have been worse.

One thing mom used to get me to do when I was smaller, before her and dad split up, sticks with me to this day. Her whole day was focused on getting done, the way she’d put it. “I just want to get done.” She did so much in a day, and as an adult now, I can identify.

Once she was done, she’d sit in her chair in the living room, and inevitably she’d forget that she’d wanted a glass of iced tea to cap the day off.

So she’d ask me.

“Chris, can you get me an iced tea?”

She made it unsweetened, and I came to learn over time that it was best with two Sweet-n-Lows and three cubes of ice.

What I wouldn’t give to be able to make my mom an iced tea today.

Column by Chris Graham