Columnist Susan Snyder: Mom gets the gift she needs

Friday, May 9, 2003 | 5:30 a.m.

My cousin forwarded one of those e-mail lists of facts and figures that can't be attributed to any credible source or person.

But one item caught my attention:

"If you yelled for eight years, seven months and six days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee."

And this made me wonder why my mother claimed to never have enjoyed a hot cup of coffee after her children were born. Using the sound theory, she could've boiled a whole vat of the stuff by the time I was 11.

"If you'd have been the first child, you'd have been the only one," she said.

Often.

Most recently, two months ago.

Anyway, this is the day we're supposed to do all the stuff we see on television -- send flowers, a gift certificate to a posh spa, diamonds, keys to a new car.

Oh, for pity's sake. A car?

Mother and I shared a car when I was in high school. I let her have it once a week to buy groceries. She wouldn't get into one in which I was behind the wheel until I was about 25.

Even now the only reason she rides with my brother or me is because she no longer drives -- at least, not from the seat where the wheel is affixed.

I wonder what these advertising people who tell us what to give our mothers give to their mothers.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall when the senior advertising executive hands his mom a certificate for a makeover. Bet he draws back a stump.

"And I suppose I'd be a beauty queen if I hadn't spent the best years of my life making sure you were fed and had clean clothes to wear! Now go into the bathroom and get me the first-aid kit so I can fix that for you. Honestly, you're bleeding all over my floor."

Motherhood is a marvel, all right. But this is not a day to marvel at the wonder through a misty lens and Hallmark sentimentality.

It's a day to wonder why they didn't kill us when they had the chance.

The pediatrician suggested tranquilizers when I was 3, and it took a few minutes for Mom to realize they weren't for her. (She sent me to dancing school instead.)

I remember Ricky Patton and I going door-to-door asking for drinking straws one Saturday. Our mothers wouldn't give us any. They didn't know why we wanted them, but they knew us well enough to know it was for nothing good.

(If you must know, we wanted to shoot spit-balls -- rocks if they'd fit -- at Brad Jones. For starters.)

We told the neighbors the straws were for a project at school, and our mothers didn't have time to go to the store. Or maybe we said they didn't have the money. Anyway, in a small town a couple of kids get only so far up the street before the phone starts ringing at home.

Eleven trips to the emergency room by the time I was 14. The high school skip day that turned into a weeklong lie and got me grounded for half my junior year. The partially dissected frog stored in the freezer and wrapped like a pound of hamburger.

Buy her diamonds to make up for it?

Not hardly.

The best thing any of us can give Mom today is the thing she worked hard to give us.

Freedom.