Like most ungrateful grown middle aged children, I found myself combing through aisles of cards at the deep discount retail operation everyone loves to hate. What can I say? The store is conveniently located and it’s replaced the manufacturing sector as the blue collar employment opportunity of the masses. At least until the economy recovers. No I didn’t type that with a straight face, even though I wish it were true.

Most of the time, I don’t bother getting a card for Mother’s Day, but I wanted something more formal to hold the photos I took. Commercial cards aren’t my thing. They express emotions I don’t feel, use words not in my vocabulary, and shellac raw emotion in artificial carcinogenic sweetness. I don’t want to exchange currency for contrived sentiment mass produced on non-recycled velum layered, uv coated paper, that’s designed to appeal to millions of other consumers shopping at the last minute. I’m not polished or well presented, just succinct and honest in an extremely unfortunate way.

I settled on simple card cloaked in sarcasm and brevity. I want to be certain my Mom knows I read the card before I purchased it. Nothing is as embarrassing as receiving the OMG, you didn’t read this because YOU would never use words this sappy and sentimental to show appreciation. Your idea of showing love means trimming the hedge or hauling away tree limbs after a wind storm eye-roll and sigh.

I know her and she knows me, pretending to be different people in glorification of a commercially castrated holiday, only serves to insult both of us. Of course if she really longed for a sappy card, I’d be more than happy to have my husband select one for her, it is after all her day, and he is better at choosing sentimental cards than I am.

So, I’m not mawkish, but I do pay attention to what my mom likes. Birds. She feeds them year around. She even refers to a certain ruby throated migratory bird as a sexual euphemism that can get you arrested in most southern states, but I think I’ll wait until she’s older to explain what a hummer really is.

Some things are learned by example, others require research, and then there are things which are more easily absorbed when taught. My mother wasn’t much of a teacher. As a career woman, and mother of three, it isn’t like she had a lot free time on her hands to gently coax us or unscrew the tops of our skulls so the information might be poured directly into our brains. She didn’t leave us to our own devices Lord of the Flies style, but many learning experiences were trial by fire, particularly when it came to cooking.

Whenever my mother, or her sisters asked my grandmother to teach them how to cook, my grandmother would point them to a sink full of dirty dishes, and respond, “You can start by washing those.” In the end, my grandmother passed down good recipes of home cookin’, but I seriously doubt she taught any of the girls how to boil water. Thankfully, she didn’t teach them how cook on high, either.

My grandmother was a different generation of a career woman raising a family. She and my grandfather were products of the Great Depression and embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of people who worked hard to earn what they had. She baked cakes. Lots of ‘em, for my grandfather’s grocery store. I suspect the first four letter word my mother learned was, shit. It was my grandmother’s expletive of choice when she dropped a freshly baked pound cake on the floor.

In spite of my grandmother’s influence, or perhaps her simple lack of patience, all three of daughters became good cooks, each bearing a distinct style of her own though all were influenced by southern traditions. The oldest, developed gourmet leanings. Unafraid to substitute ingredients if it suited her purpose, no recipe was too complex, nor too much trouble to prepare for a standing crowd of forty. What good was a crowd if you couldn’t experiment upon them? My mother, the middle child, was more traditional. She followed directions to the hundredth decimal point. The recipe wasn’t perfect, unless it contained all the ingredients exactly as printed. Unlikely to try new recipes on her own, but if prompted she would search through recipe books for hours attempting to honor my request for chinese food or paella. She is genius at selecting cuts of meat, and preparing them to their tenderest. Time spent in my grandfather’s butcher shop, was well invested.The youngest’s cooking style, was an amalgam of the older two. She tried new and exciting recipes, and followed directions with such attention as to make one think she was constructing plastic explosives in the kitchen. She surpassed the others when it came to presentation. Not only did her preparations comfort the palate, but the presentation was exquisite.

Over the years, grandchildren, would prompt my grandmother for recipes, but they all lacked the essence of what made them hers. She issued one recipe for biscuits, without including flour (her impatience wasn’t limited to teaching, apparently it included written directions as well). She advised another on her wedding day, it was essential to keep three quarts of frozen chicken stock on hand at all times, but neglected to mention why. On her fifth anniversary, the niece asked, “what am I supposed to with that chicken stock, anyway?”

Two generations of impatient women, who don’t have the time nor inclination to explain the nuances of tedious tasks. We take for granted we learned theses things the hard way, and consider you are a bright enough spark to do the same for yourself. I doubt I ever learn to make biscuits.

I thought the days of scraped knees and blue shins were behind me, like the childhood days of creating a homemade slip-n-slide out of a plastic drop cloth and using dishwashing detergent as a lubricant. That was the last scraped knee, or was a small gash,I recall having. Maybe childishness never really evaporates, we just grow too uptight to appreciate the joy and begin dismissing it in the name of sophistication. I still adhere to some juvenile traits, like sulking. Mature, huh?

We finished the paver path and the end result feels anticlimactic. Nine months of various stages of planning, designing, compromising and redesigning, unadulterated laziness, deliveries, procrastination, begging and pleading. Completion should be a means to an end, but it falls short. Not of expectations exactly, but something like it…I can’t claim disappoint sans expectations, because how can you be disappointed if you don’t anticipate a minimal return on planning.

I’m displeased all the effort didn’t yield some pinnacle of greatness, or golden idol of suburban idealism. Nope. None of those things. Just a fucking path from the parking pad to the front door.

The neighbors have been complimentary, even generous, with their praise, though I can’t help but wonder are the praising the path itself, or the fact that it only took six months to move three palettes of concrete bricks out of the front yard. All I see are the shortcomings, the squandered preparations, and the micromanaging I’ve endured for the past four days. The slowly executed task transformed into a high priority project because the weather was sucky for execution there was a piece of equipment with an expensive rental contract (tick, tick, tick tick). The results feel paltry compared to the effort, but the neighbors aren’t concerned with such trivial details like my sanity, so the proper response is, thank you, rather than voicing that all inclusive, but…

The path should be enough, but I allowed all sense of accomplishment to be tainted by the journey. I thought if I were patient enough, anticipated enough, and knew enough about the idiosyncrasies about the project foreman, I could rise to the occasion, and be a better partner, but in the end, I just wanted wanted to chew off my own leg to escape, all over micromanaging to the hundredth decimal point. In spite of extensive planning, you can’t adequately expect to influence the basic nature of others. If they are accustomed to solving problems in specific ways, you’re unlikely to influence a change. We are who we are, and we don’t change unless we choose to.