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On Friday I went out for drinks with my coworker Carla. Carla is a lifelong resident of Methtown, and grew up on a farm on the outskirts of the area, a farm run by her grandparents that she fondly refers to as “Second Chance Farms” for her grandparents’ willingness to take in all sorts of creatures, people and animals alike, who were on their last legs. As we drank we shared our life stories, and the conversation eventually came around to her parents’ relationship.

I have met Carla’s mother before, and was surprised to find that she is a college graduate as Carla told me. Her mother today is uncomfortably childlike for a woman in her sixties, and I was unsurprised to find that she used to be a long-term client for one of our best therapists in the clinic. Carla continued with her story, explaining the role of her father in the house and the abuse that her mother suffered at the hands of her father. Carla ended up in the care of her granparents after her parents’ divorce because her mother was no longer capable of raising three children. Carla fought it every step and ended up one of the nicest and thoughtful people I’ve ever met. In short, Carla’s mother was institutionalized on three separate occasions on account of her “spells” in no small part due to her father, who was physically and emotionally abusive. Carla recalled on many occasions that her grandparents, of the second chances, knowing no better, would accuse her mother of “not getting marriage right” despite her mother’s attempts to keep the house immaculate and make miracles of pennies.

I thought of my own mother, who has made me her hobby, and the sacrifices she made for my sisters and me. I remember, during my tumultuous teen years, my parents having a fight mostly about me and my incorrigibility in which my father insisted he had “saved” her, from what then I didn’t know. I do now. At the time, I wondered if that explained her lack of friends, her obsession with appearances. Over time I realized that my parents had married not for love but for pregnancy, and that love came from there thirty years and three kids later when they together discovered the allure of auctions and antiques. I can settle for that, having grown up among a largely loveless marriage.

“She wasn’t always this way,” Carla said, taking a sip of her Seagrams and Coke. I imagine my mother wasn’t either, with her obsession over my success or lack thereof. I can imagine my parents as horny teenagers, parking in rural Nowhere, USA, to get their jollies on in a small life in a small town and finding themselves unmarried and pregnant in the early ’60s in the Jim Crow South. I wonder the sacrifices my mother made, the sacrifices my father made, in order to have kids like me and my sisters, upon which they obviously had little influence, and I realize I don’t know who my parents are.

My mother has befriended one of my own friends who happens to work in one of her buildings. We were teasing her over the phone Friday night after I got back into town from drinks with Carla, for her penchant to sing “Happy Birthday” Marilyn Monroe-style and do her Arkansas cheer to her bosses on videotape (Beans, peas okra squash! Will we win it? Oh my my gosh!). I never see my mom in friend mode. Teasing my mother is a rarity, and usually only accomplished after I have several drinks in my system. Upon mentioning her out-of-character acts over the phone, my proper, southern mother who never curses said, “Shit, I’ll sing that to anyone who will listen.” And then she urged me not to drink and drive.

And thus, I get it honestly. I love her. She falls short, but she tries, and I love her.

Happy Mother’s Day, Ma, and to all of the other moms in the world, for caring, for trying, for falling short, for your humanity. We love you.