Opening a Gift of Love on Mother’s Day
Do you suppose the Mommy Track will be closed for lack of traffic? An article I read last week took just such a tack.
Then, there was the woman who said she saw no reason why taking months out to have a baby should slow her career in any way. She obviously felt that it was her birthright to have it all--her own office bathroom, her place at the head of the conference table in the executive suite, designer clothes and her picture on the first page of the annual report.
And she also felt that she had earned a post-40 baby, cuddly, cute and advanced. I don’t know if she planned on leaving the clients’ meeting when the kid was due for his first trip to the dentist. And if she thinks that her associates will all nod and smile sentimentally when she heads for her private elevator.
I don’t know where this woman got her information, but it doesn’t work like that. Nowhere is it written that you get everything you want, although most of us chug along thinking just maybe you can. Uh-huh. What goes around comes around, you have to pay the piper, and you don’t get it all, no matter what the woman in the Fortune 500 thinks.
After that stern little sermon, allow me to be among those to remind you that today is Mother’s Day, the day to honor a boy’s best friend. Are you going to take her out to dinner? Choose the place carefully lest they serve you one of those prefabricated dinners with watery mashed potatoes, canned carrots and peas, and a piece of pale chicken.
Los Angeles has lots of wonderful restaurants, even San Franciscans and New Yorkers say so. If she fancies some kind of ethnic food, almost every area is spiked with such restaurants, sending their perfumes from Samarkand and spices from a Mandarin kitchen wafting on the California air.
Give her one of those days of beauty, or an entire make-over at one of those glamorous salons where pink-smocked young women with rose-petal skin will soothe her with satiny unguents and tell her she has the skin of a 20-year-old. She doesn’t but what’s to hurt? She will feel beautiful. Beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder. It is also in the wistful mind of the recipient of those pretty words.
If she still cooks for a household, give her a short series of cooking lessons given by internationally known chefs. There never will be anything like her meat loaf, but she’d love to learn some new appetizers recipes, or buffet dishes for a party, even a scandalous course in desserts made of Dutch chocolate, pastry cream, slivered almonds and other stuff guaranteed to make her swoon. She may not make them often, but it would be fun to know how.
Do not give her a course called New Menus for Thanksgiving Dinners, unless your family is much more liberated than any I know. The ones I know would bang their spoons on their highchair trays rather than accept one menu variation than what they’ve had all their lives.
There is a staunch and grim segment of the population who maintain that they don’t like Mother’s Day, that it is a creation of the merchants who sell candy, flowers, lace encrusted lingerie, jewelry and handbags.
It is not. It was thought up by a lady early in the century or thereabouts and generally adopted a few years later. There will be the regular stock piece explaining it soon. Then there will be the righteous hand wringing when merchandisers trot all their pretties for your selection. I have never seen anything subversive in anything that turns an honest profit for flower growers and candy makers.
I am in favor of anything that furthers trade and helps the merchant and remains within the bounds of good taste and honesty. If business isn’t good, nothing much of anything else is. Money makes the mare go, as the old English song has it.
When I am the recipient of a Mother’s Day gift, I love it, although it is always nice to think that it is prompted by devotion to my dear old silver Irish head rather than from a sense of guilt promulgated by the National Assn. of Manufacturers.
Anyway, if your mother is chairwoman of the board or if you’re so young your father’s reading this to you, get the dear old thing a present. After all, she did run that shuttle system for the high school baseball team all those years; she was usually able to find a pair of matched socks; and she was known to iron a white shirt at the last minute.
A number of you have said that you didn’t write down the mimosa recipe I tossed in the other day. Fill a blender about half full of orange juice. Toss in a handful of ice cubes. Add about 2 rounded tablespoons of powdered milk and whir. Pour a champagne flute, wine glass, jelly glass whatever a little more than half full of the mixture as they say in cookbooks and fill the rest of the glass with champagne. Oh, don’t cavil because I haven’t given accurate measurements. I don’t know, but they’re excellent.
Happy Mother’s Day to the whole kit and caboodle of you.
