Featured Story

Charity’s Column: This Christmas, I’m observing Mother’s Day

The stakes are pretty high for the Robey Christmas this year.

Last year, with vaccines on the way I decided not to chance getting my mother sick (she’s in her eighties), so she stayed in Reno, Nev. and I stayed here. In retrospect that was a good call. One in 100 older Americans have died of COVID, and although she’s not nearly out of the woods, she’s doing well.

This year, it’s not enough to get my tinseled self to Reno, I need to be Daughter of the Year, arriving with thoughtful gifts, and rapid tests and wearing an N95 mask, antlers and a red plastic nose. I have two sisters, so there’s going to be some stiff competition.

After my father passed away in his late 60s, my mother transitioned from Mommy to Matriarch. She moved to Reno and started racking up masterpoints playing bridge.

She began leading three-generation family expeditions to Europe, curated, and partly-paid-for by her. She’d take over an apartment in Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin, usually a third floor with no elevator near a bus stop (her preferred mode of transportation) cook up a storm, and make daily forays to the museums that she liked.

If you wanted to tour a palace, avoid meat and gluten, or take a cab, you were on your own.

The pandemic put an end to that extravagance, and now we convene with our matriarch at her home. You still can’t get a meatless meal unless you cook it yourself, museum visits are brief (we always go to the same one) and everyone still walks up a flight of stairs to get into her apartment.

Don’t even think of talking to her when she’s on the computer playing bridge.

When my mom was 25, it was hard to avoid motherhood and my arrival (I am the oldest) put a major crimp in her style. While taking care of three small children and my father, she became a college professor, taught English and ESL, wrote textbooks, and still teaches a French conversation class over Zoom.

We’ve got a lot of life to celebrate on this Mother’s Day/Christmas.

My sisters and their children are coming too, so we’re jockeying for position like the cutthroat siblings in “Succession” trying to be loved by their father. Mom doesn’t head an international media company, she doesn’t even watch TV, but the comparison is still roughly accurate. Each of us wants to be the favorite.

Judith is traveling all the way from Arkansas, and staying for a few weeks after Christmas, a bold strategy that may give her an advantage in my mother’s favor, especially if they can spend the weeks together without getting into a discussion of that unwise relationship my mom had a few years back with a married man approximately the age of our husbands.

Judy was living in Reno at the time, so it was hard for her to ignore this episode, which earned my mother a new moniker in her scandalized family — The Silver Fox.

Ellen isn’t traveling as far or staying as long, but she’s currying favor by bringing her dogs; beloved kennel-mates of my mother’s beagle, Snoopy. Snoopy will stand at the door and howl a hound greeting when Ellen escorts Rosa and Peanut into the apartment, and the three will form a pack of doggish cooperation that functions like a union taking over a meat-packing plant, negotiating a policy of steaks for dinner, hamburgers for breakfast and six to eight walks a day.

I plan to cook my way into my mother’s favor, a move reminiscent of the gambit Cordelia employed in the tale of “King Lear,” when she compared her parent to the salt on her food. Although it took a while, he eventually figured out it was a compliment.

I will prepare a multi-course dinner for mom and her best friend (Miss Nevada, 1957), which will commence with a Margarita straight up, followed by a steak, latkes with applesauce and crowned by homemade vanilla ice cream with a chocolate bourbon sauce.

No doubt Snoopy will get a bowl of ice cream without the bourbon sauce, and I’m still trying to figure out how to incorporate vodka into the latkes.

It’s fitting that my sisters and I should go to such lengths to try to please our mother. When we were growing up, she provided us with some of the same things; advice about what kinds of men to avoid (which we ignored), spoiled canines that trained the family to cater to their every whim, and elaborate meals guaranteed to boost the cholesterol. She also set a great example for us in her work.

In other words, the best mother ever.