I got it into my head to make a pie the other day. I have so many resources for jumping into this; nothing I couldn't just do myself, yet I'm tempted see if there's something fabulous out there—you guessed it—on tha Internet. So I chose a random weird recipe and I called into service my pie bag, hanging on the side of the refrigerator with a magnet, which is a thing I bought years ago. Has a zipper and you just roll your dough out with the zipper closed and then unzip it and Presto you have a nice Circle. Trader Joe's supplied frozen berries because I'm unable to go shop for myself. It's easy.

Week later I'm sitting in my kitchen with the second son and we have a lovely conversation about how I was getting my feelings hurt because I gave him a piece of that pie and it was still sitting on the kitchen counter 4 days later, and I did text him a couple of reminders to which he did not reply. We talked about how it is to hold grudges.

As usual I don't know where I'm going with this. I just sat down and I'm feeling sorry for myself  because today is Mother's Day and my mother died in January and for the first time I have no one to call to say Happy Mother's Day and to have somebody say back at me well happy Mother's Day to you too, my dear and we have a laugh and I don't go and see her and I don't send her a card and I don't make a fuss over it. I just call her and it's done, every fuckin' year.

I sit here waiting for essentially the same treatment, and saying to myself okay I'm 1 for 3 or 2 for 3, or sometimes even bat a 1000. Sometimes one of  'em catches up to me a week later and says oh wasn't that next week? I pride myself on having raised sons who are feminists and who would never think of using violence against a woman. I love my sons to pieces and they have been known to be spectacularly caring.

Nevertheless, in my attempt to develop bullshit detectors and to teach them to discriminate and to think, to encourage them to be independent I shot myself right in the heart. But do I want to live in a classic sitcom where the mother drops all these hints, gets upset and gets all angry and they end up giving her a surprise party? That never happens.

My daughter in law gives my youngest son grief if he doesn't do everything chocolates flowers everything for birthdays for Appreciation Day fill in the blank whatever it is. Her family doesn't permit any other behavior. And she bugs him about calling me. Dollars to Donuts I will just get some kind of, I want to say, desultory acknowledgment...but I won't get anything else, because once again I wanted to raise my children to be discerning thinkers not part of the mob that consumes, that looks like robots, goes to card shops, to See's candy or some mail-order flower service.

I remember getting my feelings hurt decades ago on Valentine's Day in the first year that I was married to my first guy, father of my kids. I must have given him some kind of clue because the man got me a little necklace with a rose and a card which I still have that says I love you don't ever stop touching me. t u c h i n g, the man couldn't spell to save his ass. But I was so moved by that...what can I say. I know I'm a study in contradictions. I want to be loved just like anybody.  Sorry. But I also feel like I can smell fake a mile off.

Phony smiles and insincere hugs. I guess I wanted to make sure that's not what I get.

So I get what I asked for.