Mother's Day 2012

"Give me a blog topic," she commanded as she prepared one of her standard bachelorette "dinners" - a packet of creamy chicken flavored ramen noodles and some defrosted, pre-cooked cocktail shrimp. No cocktail sauce and the meal eaten over the sink because he wasn't there to sit with her.

"When?" he asked as he devoured a carefully prepared chicken salad on the other end of the line, a healthy, fresh concoction with pan roasted pine nuts, avocado and extra onion. He skipped the fattening but delicious fresh parmesan cheese because she wasn't there to harangue him with her nonstop dairy lobbying. He should have felt relieved.

"Like now," she replied. "I am about to write and you are about to go to sleep. You got up at an ungodly hour but at least you didn't wake me. Anyways, give me a blog topic." An on-and-off insomniac with a penchant for bad dreams, she had slept like a rock next to him the night before.

"Why don't you write about Mother's Day?" He shifted in bed with his work clothes still on, wishing her head was in that sweet spot in the crook of his right arm.

"You mean the Mother's Day that wasn't disappointing because you let me recognize that my mom abandoned me 11 years ago, held me in your arms while I cried for a few minutes and totally neutralized the whole crisis? You told me I was beautiful, smart and loving and she was the loser. Then we went for a bike ride, got massages and you baked me a meatloaf and a pumpkin pie while we danced to Frank Sinatra's 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams' in the kitchen. It stopped being Mother's Day, the annual spectacle of parent-child love from which I feel curiously alienated because my mother is neither dead nor alive. She's just missing - by choice. But after those first few minutes of release you swept me up and none of that mattered. Where's the drama in that?"

As she grilled him, images of Sunday's Malbec, open windows, a warm oven and her cheek against his neck fostered a feeling of reminiscent dreaminess that belied the serious of her inquiry.

"Maybe that's your story," he said matter of factly.