Mom

When I was 7, my mother decided our family needed some culture. She bought a secondhand piano and started calling our den "the Music Room." She loved referring to "the Music Room" as though it were "the Conservatory" or "the Drawing Room." (None of our friends had music rooms.) Before long, a floor-model Zenith radio and an RCA record player joined the piano. My father built shelves for albums of classical LPs. Our family dined to Strauss waltzes and symphonic suites. On Saturdays, my older sister, Janet, and I were forced to listen to live performances from the Metropolitan Opera while we did our chores.

For a little while, every mom is a fashion-maker. To her small cadre of small admirers, she is "boo-tee-ful," the epitome of fashion, the essence of style.Even her cast-offs are coveted. Her run-down heels are more precious than Cinderella's slipper; her college-era T-shirts sought after as sleepwear; her scarves the stuff of Superman's capes and bride's veils. To look like mom, to dress like mom, makes a little one big stuff.Then, all too soon, mom is the antithesis of fashion.Whatever she wears is wrong.

When Maryland guard Dez Wells was waiting for the NCAA to grant him a waiver regarding his eligibility after transferring from Xavier this season, he credited his mother back in Raleigh, N.C. for helping him stay positive and focused. But Pamela Wells is a lot more than her son's motivational coach. When he was growing up, the former Division II All-American at nearby St. Augustine's College taught her youngest child about how to be physical on the basketball court. “Growing up, my mom always taught me to be tough.

Ohio mom Tiffany Tehan ran away from her husband and her year-old baby with a handyman and, after a televised search, was found five days later in a Miami motel room with him. She had "wanted a new life," authorities said. When she returned, television cameras were waiting. Reporters shouted questions, demanding to know what was next for the couple. And Good Morning America's Elizabeth Vargas was on the air passing judgment: "It is one thing to walk out on your husband. It's a whole ‘nother thing to walk out on your daughter.

"Mom," my daughter said to me. In a text message, of course. "Nobody's mother visits them at the office." "I just want to see where you work, honey," I said. "It's not like I am going to hang out there." The answer was still no. The workplace of a young professional is off-limits to mothers. I am not sure what my daughter thought I wanted out of such a visit. That I would measure for drapes or tell embarrassing baby stories to her boss or ask if that handsome young man in the cubicle next to her was unattached.

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Sure, Connie Chung was unethical in the way she treated Mom Gingrich. No question about it. But she's also weird.The TV creature has created a flap in politics and journalism by tricking Newt Gingrich's mom into calling Hillary Clinton a nasty name.In a taped interview with Mrs. Kathleen Gingrich, 68, Chung asked Mrs. Gingrich what her boy, Newt, has said about President Clinton.The question led to the following exchange:Mom Gingrich: "Nothing, and I can't tell you what he said about Hillary."

THE WORLD believes that Neil Armstrong was the first human being to walk on the moon.But the world, as so often happens, is wrong.It was my mother.That's right. One small step for Mom.And one giant leap for the way I would forever view life on Earth.She didn't do it for the glory or the march of science.Mom traveled 240,000 miles into space and back for the same reason she did everything else: to teach me a lesson."Do something," she said before blasting off. "Do something that matters."Mom liked to preach.

For public viewing, Alescia Buford keeps her pride over her TC son Damon's remarkable first week in the big leagues hidden, allowing only a tiny smile last night when he made a nice running catch in left-center field.But all you need to do to get her talking about her baby boy is to ask, "Are you Damon's mother?"Then, the pride rushes out like so much water over the banks of a swollen river."This has got to be one of the absolute greatest things to happen in my life," she said last night from her seat just behind home plate.

If you're looking for a way to add some guilt and stress to your life, here's a suggestion: Take your 85-year-old mother to a movie that's totally inappropriate for her. This is what I did on a recent visit to my mom's, when she decided we needed to get out of the house. "Let's go to a movie," she said. "You pick which one." Well, there wasn't much playing at the movie theater in the small town where she lives. There was a gross-out (Jackass Number Two) and a martial-arts (Jet Li's Fearless)