That’s Life — Steve Bornfeld: A mom for all seasons

Friday, May 12, 2000 | 9:07 a.m.

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His column appears Fridays. Reach him at steveb@lasvegassun.com or 259-4081.

The love was always there.

The gratitude was always there.

But the respect -- the kind an adult child pays a parent only after life has knocked you around a bit, deflated that youthful arrogance and held a mirror up to your own fallibility -- came much later.

She had always been an especially attentive, unconditionally loving mom (in more ways than you could ever list, even on one of those jumbo Hallmark cards), not to mention a prototypical Jewish mother, right down to that peculiar food fetish familiar to most guests of a Jewish hostess ("You're full? First you'll rest -- then you'll eat again").

She is generous to a fault (always returning from trips with gifts for others), thoughtful to the extreme (notes and phone calls to friends and family, whom she never allows to drift out of her everyday orbit, distance be damned) and unfailingly cheerful and talkative (to watch her rescue a flagging dinner party is to be awed by the power of social skills).

She and her husband were as devoted to their only child as parents could possibly be. Given all the divorce and abuse soiling modern family life, the child's cup of blessings runneth over.

And yet, the son never saw the mother -- a first-generation American raised long before feminism by Eastern European parents and steeped in "traditional values" -- as fully her own person.

Sure, she had opinions and expressed them. But she was such a fiercely loyal wife -- married to such a fiercely opinionated man -- that she always seemed somehow overshadowed, in stark contrast to the emerging "I Am Woman" generation of women in which her son grew up.

Although she learned to drive, she depended heavily on her husband to take her places. She genuinely loved depending on him; he loved being depended upon. It fed his sense of old-world masculinity -- and her sense of marital tradition.

She seemed, as she would readily admit, an extension of her husband -- a wonderful, loving, vibrant extension, but an extension nonetheless. ... until her husband's sudden death (hit by a car at 7 p.m., dead at 1 a.m.), cruelly halting 40 years of marriage in one wrenching night.

And it took that soul-shattering tragedy to flesh out the toughness, the gumption, the courage of this woman.

This was a woman who had never before needed to demonstrate such qualities in such quantities before -- never had to become her own "I Am Woman" woman until fate forced the issue.

Now in her 70s, this woman who went straight from her parents' home to her marriage home had to learn to be home alone, crying almost daily. But she managed to comfort her despondent son -- living two blocks away -- who had lost his job three months before his father's death and remained unemployed another 11 months afterward.

Her reward? The son got another job -- in Tennessee. He packed up and left, leaving her alone with her grief.

But 18 months later the son's career path wended west, landing him in Las Vegas. Soon after his cousin and best friend -- her beloved nephew -- followed suit. And this woman -- who through seven decades had never lived outside the East Coast, who had a truckload of friends there to alleviate her loneliness, who thrived on the local cultural life to fill a deep, dark void, who fed off the familiarity of her hometown that had become the substitute anchor in her life -- was asked the impossible:

Please leave everything you know. Everything that comforts you. Everything that anchors you. And come to Vegas.

She did. "Family," she said, "is the most important thing."

An unmarried woman who still didn't know how to be unmarried -- a stranger in a strange new part of her life -- she was also a stranger in a strange new neon land. And she called upon previously unseen reserves of strength -- strength she often doubted she had -- to rise above her considerable fears.

At a point when advancing age caused several of her friends back East to restrict or even eliminate their driving, this woman whose husband had often doubled as her driver nervously climbed behind the wheel and, slowly, solo, conquered a new city out West.

While others strenuously avoid the traffic of the Strip, she now makes a point of driving it at night, taking a childlike delight in its dazzling kaleidoscope of lights.

At a time of life when making new friends is a chore and social retreat becomes increasingly ingrained, she barrels ahead: mall shopping with one new friend, foreign film nights at UNLV with another new friend; regular breakfasts with one new neighbor; food shopping with another.

She joined a genealogy club, a Yiddish club, Hadassah -- family roots and cultural heritage being the foundation of her being.

While she's still not completely at ease in her adopted home, she vigorously defends it to naysayers, proudly pointing out its positive aspects with a convert's zeal. And she's been rewarded with uniquely Vegas moments: Singing idol Steve Lawrence embraced and kissed her backstage after a show at Casesars Palace (she trembled and felt faint).

But East Coast or West Coast, her essence remains: still generous to a fault, thoughtful to the extreme, a Jewish mother forever ("You're full? First you'll rest -- then you'll eat again").

And she has the long-overdue respect of an admiring son who belatedly discovered the many layers of a strong, remarkable woman.

With apologies for this oversized, public Hallmark card ...

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you with all my heart.

And I'll see you Sunday.