Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Read Online Free PDF Page A

she traveled on so easily in her youth have become more treacherous as she loses confidence in her ability to navigate through the world we live in today. Yet she faces these obstacles with a will of iron, determined to fill her life with meaning and purpose. At times, this translates into trying to control a part of mine.
    “Did you use that Silver Palate spaghetti sauce recipe I sent you? It has all the essential vitamins and lots of black olives, which are good for your system,” she counsels.
    “Oh, yeah, it was great!” I fib as I stir a jar of store bought marinara sauce into the pasta. When I was a new wife and mother, this type of domestic micromanaging drove me crazy. Now I’m just grateful that someone is still worried about my vitamin intake and regularity.
    “I’m sending you some articles about skin care. I think you should do something about those little brown spots on your face,” she says with the authority of a dermatologist.
    I look in the mirror and notice a blotch of spaghetti sauce on my chin.
    When I left for college, I didn’t realize that my departure would trigger an emotional spiral downward that took my mother months to overcome. She began marking her life by the events that occurred in mine: the afternoon I graduated from law school, the evening of my wedding, the morning my son was born. She needed so much more assurance once I was gone, and sharing the everyday events in our lives was the salve that soothed her loneliness. If I was preoccupied or too tired to talk, I would simply listen to her stories while I folded clothes or packed school lunches for the kids.
    An outsider listening to our conversations might think them trivial, but in reality, they are the bedrock upon which our deeper and more profound understandings occur. I hear in her words the true concern she has about my father’s failing eyesight and her fear that many of her lifelong friends will soon be gone. I know that underlying her recipes and medical advice is the fear that I’m working too hard or not taking care of myself. In discussing the more banal whats, whos and whys of our lives, we open doors to an intimacy we both want from our relationship.
    Several years ago, I sent my mother a Mother’s Day card that still hangs on her refrigerator door. On the cover, a woman is applying red lipstick in the rearview mirror of her station wagon while driving the kids to school. The caption reads: “Oh my God, I think I’ve become my mother!” Printed on the inside are the words: “I should only be so lucky.”
    I hang up just as my husband walks through the door, cell phone falling from my ear like an oversized clip-on earring. He picks it up off the floor as I acknowledge, “My mother just called.” Whatever the cost, whenever the time, she has my number. It’s called cellular love.
    Amy Hirshberg Lederman

Mini Massage Therapists
    L ittle deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the heaven above.
    Julia Fletcher Carney
    It had been a long and exhausting day. My husband was out of town for the third night in a row, the house was a mess, the phone kept ringing, laundry and papers were everywhere, my six-year-old twins were screaming, and my head was pounding. It was a reality-based type of day with no dreamy visions of being the perfect mother with a beautiful, spotless home, laundry all neatly folded in drawers and children playing angelically side by side.
    My pleas of “Stop fighting, you two!” “Please stop running in the house!” and “Please play quietly!” went unheeded.
    “Mom, Jake came in my room!”
    “I did not!”
    “Yes, you did . . . Mom—he’s not listening!”
    “You’re not the boss of me!”
    “But it’s my room!”
    “So what! Who do you think you are, Princess Tara or something?”
    “Mom, Jake is calling me Princess Tara again! Mom!”
    I screamed, “Stop it, you two!” Rather than quiet them, my loud reprimand caused their voices to