My Mom, The Fixer

Throughout my childhood, my mom was The Fixer. You had a problem, yo, she solved it faster than Vanilla Ice, no revolving DJ necessary. The vacuum would start emanating that burned-motor smell, and she would spend the next half-hour sitting on the kitchen floor, vacuum cleaner upside down, with a screwdriver in her hand. She'd take it apart, clean off the gobs of hair wrapped around the rotor, retrieve whatever plastic hair tie had clogged it, reassemble it and finish cleaning the floor. "A clean machine is a happy machine," she would say.

Put a package on it!

My sister and I liked to draw at the kitchen counter when we were little. Mom would be in the same room, cooking or doing science experiments in the sink or whatever moms do in the background when you're six years old and self-involved. Ma, the meatloaf! I never know what she's doing in there.

We'd invariably make a mistake -- the cat's tail was too fat or we left an "r" out of "Merry Christmas." We always went straight for the markers, never learning from experience to write it in pencil first. We'd wail that our life was over because of this egregious error; now, we would have to start all over, and we just didn't have it in us to face the blank canvas (manila construction paper)again. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Mom would swoop in with a fix: "Put a present over it!" Thus, our artwork was littered with random, brightly wrapped packages with red bows, smack in the middle of words, trees and cat's hindquarters to unsubtly cover our mistakes -- kind of like a kindergarten version of Japanese Kintsugi.

Mom applied the same technique to our clothing. When holes appeared in the knees of my jeans way before I'd outgrown them, she covered them with the assorted patches she kept in her sewing stuff -- rainbows, hearts, flowers (presents). Until that is, I reached sixth grade and patched knees became too horrifyingly uncool for school. She sewed up the holes my sister accidentally cut in the collars of her shirts while trying to rid them of every millimeter of itchy tag full of size designations and washing instructions with a pair of safety scissors. Once, my sister cut a hole in a nightgown my grandmother had made, viciously forcing it to part ways with the detestable bow on its front. Mom fixed that, too.

Put it in a box.

Mom was also a pretty good fixer for teenage hearts that had been shattered into a million-billion pieces causing much weeping to sappy Richard Marx songs. When I broke up with my first serious boyfriend and was wringing my hands over what to do with all of the memorabilia of our relationship that had adorned my room for the entire nine months of our coupling, Mom knew what to do. I didn't want to look at that shit, but I couldn't bear to throw it away, so she brought me a box. We put all the precious things -- dried flowers, saccharine love notes, mason jar full of deflated balloons (a story for another time) -- inside and stashed it in the back of my closet where I would find it several years later and toss it without a second thought.

Break out the lug wrench.

Mom is in her best form when annoying and unpredicted problems arise. She's good with a flat tire. One year, she changed no less than six of them, each time on her way home from work. My dad accused her of running over nails on purpose, which made perfect sense. I'm sure she was just itching to wrench off lug nuts on the side of the highway in the dark after working ten hours at the hospital where she'd, incidentally, been fixing things all day.

In a crisis, Mom is cool as a little Fonzie. She's the one you want first on the scene of a car accident and first in line to fix a ruined bridesmaid's dress an hour before the ceremony. When my sister's best friend's mom exited stage left to go live in New Hampshire with her boyfriend, leaving two kids and a hapless ex-husband behind, my mom helped pick up the pieces. She shuttled those kids to and from school, dance classes and soccer. She fed them when necessary. She sprinted down to their house to shut off the malfunctioning burglar alarm all. the. time. Because no one was home and they didn't want to have to pay the security company for yet another false alarm. "Stay calm now, fall apart later," was her motto.

Pass down the skills.

My mother is the reason I calmly handled a tire blowout while driving a child-molester-sized van full of day camp kids 65 miles an hour down I35. She is the reason I fix the holes in my adult jeans, though now they show up, relentlessly, in the butt along the back pocket seam where my trunk junk can't be contained by mere denim. She is why, when my toddler fell and hit his head on the tile so hard he started passing out and throwing up, I didn't explode in a volcano of dysfunctional hysteria while trying to keep him awake on the way to the ER and instead pressed that rising panic down so I could function for my son.

Luckily, he was okay. Fortunately, I didn't have to find time to fall apart later because I was so relieved my kiddo wasn't permanently brain-damaged (though it was a little hard for the doctor to assess since he'd just started walking and moved around like a drunken college student already). It's a good thing, too, because that kid is ten now, and he'd look pretty funny with a red and green-bowed Christmas package on his head.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. And thanks for always keeping our shit together.