Week Five Poem-a-Week Challenge: Ode to My Mom

This week's Poem a Week Challenge was to write an ode. I decided to write about my mom, instead of writing more poetry about the pandemic. So this is what I came up with. It is still hard to write about Mom, even though it's been 20 years. It's funny -- I thought when I had kids Mother's Day would start to mean more to me, but it really hasn't worked out that way. But Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there.

An Ode to My Mom

I always feel left out when it comes to this sort of thing. 

Tributes to moms. Mother-daughter weekends. Mother’s Day.

My mom died twenty years ago this month. Right after Mother’s Day. 

Were she alive, I would have already ordered a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to her. 

I would be thinking of our phone call on Mother’s Day. What anecdotes I would relate regarding my kids. What Todd is up to. I would tell her about my week.

But she’s gone. So I will instead remember her to my kids. I will tell them stories about her.

Like the time she marched down to City Hall to demand that I be allowed to play baseball, even though I was a girl and there were no girls on the team. 

Or the time she chased a boy out of our driveway when he called me fat. She had a broom and threatened to beat him with it if he didn’t apologize. He apologized.

Or the time she told my high school English teacher that I was coasting in his class and needed to be challenged, so he made me rewrite all my essays. Which I hated at the time, but appreciated later.

My mom was my fiercest advocate. She called me out on my nonsense. She was funny and sweet and tough. I try to be like her. I miss her. 

Happy Mother’s Day.