Mothers And Daughters

Today, you will probably call or be called. You might give or get a burnt-toast breakfast in bed, a blouse in the wrong size, a rapidly browning orchid to wear to church or yet another "i lovE mOMMy" masterpiece to add to the refrigerator gallery.It has always been thus. How, after all, do you take the most complicated, the most enduring, the most potentially loving or traumatic of all human relationships and somehow wrap it up in a tidy present, hopefully for under $29.99?The answer is you don't, you can't, you never will.

LONG BEFORE Sun readers were caught up in the story of Marci Glazer Crosby's courageous battle to control the quality of her life and death, many people had been touched by her passion for life and her devotion to those she loved. In her final months, she inspired others as well. Family and friends, even people she never met -- including a contingent of Colorado students -- cheered her on in her fight for life.Those efforts may have seemed like a losing battle. But even though Marci Crosby did not survive her final bout with cancer, she was no loser.

Mother-bashing. It is one of the most popular pastimes of the '90s.It goes from the Oprah show (as in "My mother stole my husband" or "My mother made me clean my plate and that's why I weigh 400 pounds") to magazine articles about famous people who had overbearing mothers (February's Ladies' Home Journal cover story in which Jodie Foster talks about her lost childhood and her changing relationship with her mom). Who cares?And then some medical bulletins give fuel to the flame: "You can be allergic to your mother . . ."

A mother and her 13-year-old daughter were slain and another daughter, 10, critically injured by a killer who bludgeoned and stabbed them in their Reservoir Hill apartment, Baltimore police said.Cynthia D. Gilliam, 30, and her daughters, Donnette D. Smith, 13, and Jacqueline D. Parker, 10, were attacked Tuesday night or yesterday morning in their basement apartment in the Georgian Court complex, police said.A cousin of Ms. Gilliam went to visit the family just before 9 a.m. yesterday and entered after finding the door ajar.

Idelisse Malave was helping her 7-year-old daughter pull on a pair of blue jeans in a store dressing room when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. "Oh, God," Ms. Malave said. "How ugly I look."It's something women say to themselves all the time, and Ms. Malave was feeling hassled and harried and imperfect that day.Her daughter, Esti, stared at her. Ms. Malave will never forget it. "You're not ugly, Mommy," she said. "You look like me.""At that moment I went cold inside," says Ms. Malave, a 46-year-old New York lawyer.

Mothers always seem to worry about their children.Viola Weiss' worries increased when she and her daughter Christine both enrolled in Howard Community College's nursingprogram."

Denim gets better and softer with time. So does the fabric of the relationships between mothers and daughters in the times spent sharing games and secrets. Denim, the fabric of America's carefree hours, wears comfortably across the years and generations.

A 75-year-old mother and her 39-year-old daughter were found stabbed to death in their Carney home last night, Baltimore County police report.After notifying relatives, police identified the victims as Gertrude Poffel, 75, and her daughter, Pamela, 39, both of 2816 Fifth Ave.The bodies remained inside the house overnight while homicide detectives examined the crime scene. The state medical examiner's office in Baltimore was to perform autopsies on the two women today.The women were found stabbed to death shortly before 8 p.m. last night by a friend of the daughter who spoke on the telephone to one of the women earlier in the day, police said.

When I opened my eyes, she was there. I saw her beautiful face bent over her needlepoint, engrossed, a faint smile on her lips, her blond hair picking up the morning rays through the dusty hospital window. It was a few years back when I had just had a serious back operation.No, it wasn't my mother beside me, it was my oldest daughter, and I was coming out of anesthesia. It was around the spring of the year. So I have been thinking about her, about how our roles became gradually reversed. She, the caretaker now, caring for me.She said, "I'm here, Mom," just as I had reassured her of my presence back when she was 7 and had just had her tonsils out: "I'm here, darling."

MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS.Elena Bonner.Knopf.349 pages. $23.Although Elena Bonner gained fame as the wife -- now the widow -- of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, she already had lived an interesting life in interesting times before they met.Add to this a most remarkable memory, and a gift for writing, and one could expect a fascinating memoir. Unfortunately, "Mothers and Daughters" is merely good.One problem is that remarkable memory. "Mothers and Daughters" runs to more than 300 pages but deals almost entirely with her life only up to age 14. It begins when she is still in a high chair, age 2 or 3.Not only does she remember broad details of incidents, but she remembers small details, too: where they lived.