I wish I could tell you exactly why we didn’t get along. Maybe I resented my parents’ divorce, and because she screamed louder, I blamed her more. Maybe I blamed her for seeming to hate me. (I was what was called, back before all children were pathologized, a “difficult child.”) She felt mothers should be respected universally, and I felt like we should talk everything out. I wanted to be understood. She wanted me to understand that I wasn’t her friend, I was her daughter. When she hears my sister using the parenting language of today on her son – “I hear that you’re frustrated, because it’s frustrating to not be able to own a machine gun, but you just can’t have one” – she rolls her eyes and thinks back to the days when a kid who asked for something unreasonable could just be sent to his room.

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My mother was 37 years old, twice divorced and childless when she met my father. She had been living in Manhattan for 17 years, having grown up in Connecticut and gone to the Rhode Island School of Design to study painting. She had dozens of friends, went to parties and attended art openings. She smoked pot in the Village and spent Tuesday nights in smoky jazz clubs, sipping martinis and recrossing her legs.

My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out, my mother stood my father up. She’d gone to Long Island that day with a friend to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

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Over the next five years, I got that seat. I spent Hanukkahs, Passovers, even Purims in Judy’s plant- and music-filled home in Amherst, Mass., my picture hanging on her fridge alongside her children and grandchildren. To her, I was a done deal. I was family. To David, not so much.

After thousands of dollars spent on couples therapy, David still couldn’t make up his mind about me. He kept saying he “wanted to want to marry me.”

“What did I do wrong?” Judy asked me one day, in a stolen, private moment, not understanding why David was unable to commit to me.

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Every once in a while Annie and I rev ourselves into a flurry of emails about what's happening with our kids, how we're handling it (or not), and how much it sucks to worry the way we do. On Mother's Day, we thought it fitting to share one of those exchanges, which runs the gamut from how much to pay for your child's shampoo to the tiny and humongous and inevitable failures that come along with parenting.

Meredith Maran: While you were pregnant, did you read one of those perennial news stories about how much it cost, then, to raise a kid from birth through age 18? And did that give you the crazy idea that you'd actually spend only that much? And, even crazier, that you'd be finished paying when your son was 18?

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Suddenly, she was reduced to a series of lettered and numbered bones -- some of them fractured, some with lesions. A bone scan showed her skeleton with glowing white spots scattered from femur to collarbone. The MRI detailed the troublesome spots: T3, T11, L2, L5, the right sacrum and the femur. At first, I repeated this medical jargon to anyone who would listen and watched as their eyes glazed over. To them, these were meaningless letters and numbers; to me, they were everything.

Through several Google searches, I located each of the diseased bones in diagrams and x-rays of unnamed strangers' bodies. It was like reading the human anatomy section of my high school biology textbook all over again. I unconsciously touched my own body as I identified each part: the third rib (my fingers pressed into the flesh of my chest, noting the thump-thump of my heart), a vertebra mid-back, two more vertebrae in the lower back, the very base of the spine and then the thighbone.

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Our short list includes an action film, a horror movie, an environmentally conscious historical epic, a murder mystery, a free-form memory piece, and several films worth watching, on Mother's Day or any other day. Add your own wild card Mother's Day movie selections in the Letters section.

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Well, hey, at least MTV is being more realistic than the abstinence-only message pushed by teen mom Bristol Palin.

It's strange, though. None of these moms – who are really only known to us because they are famous for having children at such a young age – say that they are happy with their decision. Of course that kind of message (Amber Portwood is glad she had a kid in high school!) wouldn't be likely to get very far, especially since MTV has positioned the show as more of a cautionary tale than a reality star haven. Plus, this is still a public service announcement after all, not a bad-idea machine.

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My mother was always there. She was a 1950s housewife, living in the '60s and '70s. Whatever my siblings and I needed, she gave: hand-sewn prom dresses; homemade Christmas ornaments; she pulled up a stool and offered step-by-step advice (through the locked bathroom door I refused to open for, oh, an hour) about how to insert my first tampon. When I confessed to her, as a child, that I had stolen candy bars from a local store, she helped me believe life could go on and be righted, and it was that safety, that lying together in my bed, that ensured I would never steal anything again. When I was 15, and broke my arm falling off a runaway horse, careening straight downhill behind my house in the rain, I didn't cry -- it didn't even hurt -- until I laid eyes on my mother.

She was also the mother my friends wanted advice from; many of them didn't have their own parents handy since they were away at boarding school, but she was more than a convenient replacement. She never judged anyone, no matter what they admitted to her. Despite the fact that I had two siblings and a father, I believed that her life was, entirely and exclusively, devoted to me.

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"Huh?" my mom replied, distracted, her arms stretched over the roof of the station wagon, adjusting bungee cords. It was the morning we were leaving Sonoma, and all the neighbor kids and their mothers were crowded around our fully loaded car, which my mom had strategically packed inside and on top with everything we'd need for the week it would take us to drive across the country.

For days on end as Billy and John and I had raced our bikes in the cul-de-sac with the neighbor kids or gone swimming with Mary Anne or to movie matinees chaperoned by one of the other moms, my mother had been packing up in preparation for the moving van and driving us across the country by herself. When we reached Ohio, she would leave us for a couple of weeks with relatives we knew only by name, my father's younger brother Don and his family, while she and our dad found us a new place to live in Pennsylvania.

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But Mother's Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.

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She was a great cook, but this wasn't going to be one of those "her food saved our relationship" stories. She once accidentally dropped sugar into a wok of fried rice. When I asked her why it was sweet, she snapped at me for being too stupid to understand anything. No, it was going to be a bitter story of salvaging the one true good memory I have of her cooking: the velvety coffee banana pudding she would make for parties.

But it's not going to be that story, because it turned into something else when I asked my mother if she knew how to make it.

"I thought she just bought coffee Jello and put bananas in it! But I'll call her up and ask her!" she replied perkily in an e-mail. (Mom is the world's perkiest replier of e-mails, averaging more exclamation points than sentences.)

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The phenomenon of the women's movement going in and out of vogue has been with us almost since the term feminism was coined and the smoking and drinking flappers of the 1920s looked with disdain on the dour suffragettes. As Faludi, author of the seminal feminist text "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," looked into these ebbs she noticed that early feminists often used "the language of home protection, they were mothers protecting their daughters." The women that followed, however, set about "denouncing their elder feminists as whiners and zealots," she said. "Everyone piled on mom."

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To investigate, I talked to Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, about the ways mom's cooking shapes our memories of childhood and our preferences as adults.

Why is our mothers' cooking so special to us?

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Political activism seems a world removed from the hearts-and-flowers sentiments of Mother's Day. But if 19th century poet and feminist Julia Ward Howe had had her way, the mothers of the world would not be spending the second Sunday in May being pampered and feted, but rather joining with other mothers in a global call for peace.

Howe was spurred to action in 1870 with the start of the Franco-Prussian War in Europe a conflict that lasted less than a year, but managed to inflict tremendous casualties in both the military and civilian populations, create both the modern German state and the French Republic, and start Europe down the path to the First World War, more than four decades later.

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My AFDC clients were mostly single mothers of color. A handful had husbands at home who were unable to work for one reason or another, but, mostly, they were women raising children alone.

It was frustrating work; my clients either couldn't or wouldn't help themselves, and most of them knew little or cared nothing about birth control. When I tried to educate them I was eventually called into the main office of my state's welfare department. One Irish-Catholic supervisor informed me that the "Catholic taxpayers of the state" were not paying my salary for me to disseminate "birth control information which they [didn't] believe in."

One of my clients stood out in my mind, however, because she was the only one of all these women who ever discussed the possibility of an abortion with me.

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Mom 1.0 was a quintessential Brooklyn girl by way of old Romania and eventually became a stalwart '50s housewife, which included the wearing of pillbox hats on special occasions. She was already at work teaching me how to make the old Jewish family recipes when all I could manage was to toddle by her fabulous red shoes on the kitchen floor. It was never too soon to learn the heart and soul of those old recipes along with handy kitchen skills that serve me still. She could roll strudel pastry so thin you could see through it, without tearing the dough.

She baked special Valentine cupcakes and provided mom-made matching clothing for both of us that was as good as couture. She inherited the dressmaking gene from her mother and aunts. Frail and ill, she died way too young and missed out on the best years with her children and grandchildren.

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Most mothers volunteer this information to friends and strangers with equal enthusiasm, but personally, I tend to focus more on the gutter rat I was before I had a kid. What was wrong with me? Shuffling around in my socks all day, a sullen blur of messy hair and unraveling sweaters, plodding aimlessly over my dust bunny-covered floors, mooning over some complete jerk. I want to say to my single, childless self, Sweet Jesus, woman, have a little self-respect! Get your act together, at long last!

What excuse did I have, to be such a wreck? These days there's a perfectly good reason for my disheveled appearance and my unkempt home: I'm absolutely consumed by the love I feel for my offspring. Today my hair is a wreck and my house is filthy because I'm focused entirely on bathing my children in the white, glowing warmth of my infinite love.

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She turns 94 this week and still lives in her own home, drives her own car and only recently gave up playing senior women's hockey. She was tough, let me tell you, and as she slowed down, she resorted more and more to high-sticking and tripping. As she says, "Old age is not for the timid. I didn't get to be 94 by baking lots of sugar cookies."

I went shopping for a Mother's Day gift at a clothing store but, as it turned out, it was a men's store. So as long as I was there, I bought myself a few nice suits.

And anyway, Mom said, "No gifts for me until Larry gets out of the pokey." I said, "Mom, Larry was selling Powerball Bibles with the winning number hidden in Scripture. He was selling stock options to evangelicals with the promise that the Lord would come again in 2008. It didn't happen. He's going to spend 10 to 15 years making license plates." She said, "So he misread prophecy. He's not the first." I said, "Ma, he misread it to the tune of $16 million in profit to himself that is sitting in a bank in the Bahamas."

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Four months later, Grace died from a virulent form of strep. She was five years old. Ju Hua and her daughter had moved into their own apartment by then. When they heard the news, they came immediately. Ju Hua's face was stricken, her crying uncontrollable. "That girl," she said. "So special."

Grace was studying Chinese at school, and even after Ju Hua left us, Grace would visit her and practice Chinese. "Her pronunciation so good!" Ju Hua would tell me when I picked Grace up. They had cooked together, fried rice and dumplings and the pork dish Grace liked so much. Smelling of garlic and sesame, Grace would wave goodbye to Ju Hua as we drove away. Then she would sing me a Chinese song, or count to twenty in Chinese.

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It begins in innocence. Music is playing, the night smells of lilacs, she asks if he would like to come in for a minute, and he does, and little does she know what cataclysm awaits her inside: the loss of individuality as she joins the Holy Order of Maternity.

Mothers were, at one time, young women with Possibilities who might have taken a different route and become glamorous and powerful figures in Size 2 dresses and instead found themselves cleaning up excrement and jiggling colicky babies to get them to stop screaming. They hardly ever get to London anymore or have time to read James Joyce. They sit down to dinner with adults and feel brain-dead. A bouquet of flowers hardly seems compensation enough. How about a million dollars and a house in the south of France?

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