You’ll Really, Really, Really Like My Mother

I imagine my mom and my friend Mike sitting in the shade of my imaginary garden, surrounded by roses, hummingbirds, chocolate mint, tomatoes, a prickly lemon bush and rusty lawn furniture plumped with striped cushions in Martha Stewart colors. There they are, Mom and Mike, Diet Cokes in hand, challenging each other for the “I Had The Worst Mother” championship.

Unfortunately I can’t take the fantasy much farther than that because they could go on for hours, and I have stuff to do. For starters, I need to eat a half-jar of Skippy Creamy (the Costco size), lament the fact that I ate so much, and then spend hours working it off.

I lucked out — my mom is everything her mother wasn’t, and if that weren’t enough, she makes the world’s best pies. But in honor of offspring everywhere who deserved a better start in life, I’ve posted several entries about books that might make you look at your own mother with increased gratitude. Or not.

You’ll Like My Mother, Naomi Hintze

After her army husband is killed in combat, pregnant widow Francesca Kinsolving travels to Duluth, Minnesota to meet her mother-in-law. The heavily pregnant widow becomes stranded by a blizzard, but that’s just the beginning of Francesca’s troubles. Soon she uncovers dark secrets, including the fact that her husband’s brother is a psychopath who has escaped from a mental ward, and that her mother-in-law is hiding him in the basement. I can’t believe my own mother let me read this suspenseful, heavy-handed potboiler when I was a kid. (Thanks, Mom, for always encouraging my love for books!)