Father’s Day. The day to pay tribute to your paternal teacher, the person who showed you how to do things, who set an example in how to live, who was there to answer the tough questions. And so I would like to give my deep thanks to the person who did that, the father in my life.

Mom.

My parents divorced when I was nine, and my mother raised me from there on out. In truth, she was the main parent even before that. Before the divorce, it was she who carted my brother and me off to Vacation Bible School (well, who walked with us), tended to my several smashed noses, and helped with the homework. It was she who was the Cub Scout Den Mother (I guess my father couldn’t have been) and who came to the baseball games. It was she who enforced the “you have to at least taste the dinner made for the whole family” rule and made me eat that damn corned beef and cabbage (the boiled potatoes I scarfed down too quickly to mix with the yucky mucilaginous cabbage), which had been detestable when warm and was unbearable after sitting on my plate for an hour. But, then, the whole time I sat at the table, trying to summon the gumption to take just one bite, it was she who stayed in the kitchen with me. Not my dad. He took off.

My father was not a bad man. He never hit us. He never berated us. He did nothing to torment my brother or me. He just had a weakness. For booze. The booze didn’t make him violent or nasty. It just caused a promising career and a happy marriage to both dissolve.

And I have to give my dad a lot of credit. AA and God helped him regain control of his life. He cleaned up and started fresh. He found steady work—tough, physical work, but honest work. He remarried, choosing a wonderful woman who was loving and sweet and uncompromising. He found two communities, his church and the VFW, where he felt at home. In the VFW, he was able to harness his talents to become a leader not only in his post but in the state. When he died, scores of people showed up to honor him, and that honor was well deserved.

But all that was all outside the family. For the first dozen or so years after the divorce, I barely saw my father. He picked me up a few times early on, but sometimes those “visits” simply meant sitting in a bar with him. Not the most comfortable place for a ten-year-old. And the sporadic visits disappeared pretty quickly.

My brother tried picking up the parental slack. Five years older, and far more aware of the workings of the world than I, he tried to help. But he was entering full-blooded teenhood and a snotty-nosed, idiot younger brother got in the way, so he kinda drifted off. That, and he joined the Marines.

So that left it up to my mother to be Mom and Dad. She was a strong woman, and up to the task. And what did she teach me?

Invest in the future. When she had little money for food because she had to pay off the debts my dad had run up, she fed my brother and me but said she wasn’t hungry.

Be patient. One day, and friend and I were tossing the football on a playing field near his home. It had rained for two days straight, and the field was a bog. At one point, one of us threw a pass that was just out of the reach of the other. (This was a frequent occurrence; we weren’t very accurate.) The “receiver” slipped in trying to reach the ball and slid onto the ground, getting quite dirty. Inspiration—or the devil—seized us, and we determined to get ourselves completely covered by throwing balls low to the ground and diving for them. Again and again we did it until we were coated in a layer of liquid dirt. As I biked home, I wondered what my mother would say. I knew enough to not enter the house without getting her go ahead and instructions on how to proceed. So when I got home, I knocked on the side door. When she opened it, she saw me standing outside, looking like a bowl of ice cream drenched in chocolate sauce. Quietly, she said “Go downstairs and strip to your underpants. Put everything in the washtub there. And don’t ever do that again.” She turned and walked away. She never said another word about it.

Be firm but fair. One summer, my brother and his friends and I got into a water balloon war with the kids on the next block. It was innocent fun, but the situation escalated, and the two camps agreed on one final, all-out battle. Since Mom worked and our house was empty (all the other mothers were home), our house became headquarters. And the supply depot. We spent two days filling water balloons and hiding them every place we could. My brother, a tactician of some skill, devised a plan to lure the enemy kids up the alley toward our backyard, where they would then be ambushed by hoses and barrages of balloons. It all played out as planned, and we won a glorious victory. The war ended early enough in the afternoon that we could clean up the rubbery shrapnel and all the water could dry. We were, we thought, safe from any parental repercussions. Except that a neighbor intercepted my mother as she walked home from the bus stop and related the whole thing. Tired from a long day at work, stung that we had violated her trust by letting kids run all over the house, hurt, perhaps, that we had shamed her by seeming to be out-of-control kids, my mother nevertheless managed to quickly (only 100 feet between hearing the news and reaching home) resolved on a fitting punishment. We were grounded for two weeks, but we were allowed to have one friend, and one friend only, at a time during the day.

Practice what you preach. In 1967, Detroit, my hometown, was scarred by riots. The outburst of anger and fire revealed a tragic fissure between the black and white communities, one that has contributed to the city’s unfortunate history. The pastor of our church felt that something needed to be done to try to bridge this dangerous gap. He introduced a plan to invite ministers and congregants from black churches in the inner city to our church, with he and his parishioners to reciprocate. He hoped, in this way, that good Christians could find common ground and, in a small way, begin to heal a wounded city. It never happened. The congregation of our church rejected the idea completely. They went further, forcing the pastor to resign. My mother was outraged. She was deeply religious and had been devoted to that church—back before the divorce, and her having to work, she had run that Vacation Bible School that she made us go to. And so she told all those good Christians what they could do with their morality and walked out the door, never to return to that church again.

Be open to people. When my brother was in high school, his friends came over to our house to hang out. When I was in high school, the same thing happened. The reason? My mother made everyone welcome. She listened to other kids’ stories, she bantered with them, she teased them, and she accepted them. And so she became Den Mother once again—because she was born to be. On the night of my high school graduation, I was home with mononucleosis. When my mom got home from work that night, she fed me something and then said, “OK, I’m going to school tonight to see my kids graduate.” After I went away to college, some of my friends still came by from time to time to talk to her. She was their counselor. In college, the same thing happened. She came to visit me a couple of times, and immediately all my friends gravitated to her. We’d all hang around and shoot the breeze. She’d tell stories, but she’d also ask them where they had come from, what they were studying, what plans they had. And she encouraged them all, making them feel that they could do anything, because she said so. (All that hanging around was wonderful but frustrating for me. I loved that my friends loved her and she them, but it cut into opportunities to make out with my girlfriend, now wife.)

Be open to life. It’s hard for me to pick my favorite song from Mame because so many of them stir deep feelings about my mother. She knew when we needed a little Christmas, and she and a dear friend were “Bosom Buddies.” But the one I associate most with my mother’s attitude to life is “Open a New Window.” Though she never went to college (a real shame, that, she could have done anything), she was intellectually alive. She was always reading, and she was always ready for new ideas. She had projects going, and she died with many unfinished. That’s OK. She wouldn’t have wanted to be alive without projects.

Show respect for others. Once my uncle, her brother, became angry at his older son for something the kid had done. He reamed my cousin in front of all of us, then sent him off to rectify the error. My mother told my cousin, “When you finish, come back and I’ll tell you what your daddy did when he was your age.” After the kid left, my uncle seethed. “Don’t show me up in front of my children,” he said to my mother. “Don’t scold your children in front of everyone,” she returned.

Work hard. To pay off debts, my mother did anything she could to earn money. She took in people’s wash and ironing. She did sewing. She catered functions for a while. This didn’t last years, but it was hard on her while it did. But she never complained, and she set an example. Even when she was simply working at her job, she worked efficiently and effectively, managing everything she did with skill and ease.

Show love. One of the happiest moments in my life is hearing her voice on the phone when I told her that my future wife and I were going to marry. Her happiness, her complete emotional embrace of my future wife was so evident in her voice and words that it blessed the news with perfect joy.

Laugh. My mother knew that it was important to laugh. Despite hardships, despite disappointments, despite living alone with no supportive adult for many years, my mother never lost her sense of humor or her upbeat view of life. We laughed at old movies, we laughed at her quick wit, we laughed at her crazy mother, and we laughed at silly signs. We laughed when she impishly taught the toddler next door to meet his father, when he came home from work, with the greeting “Frankenstein.” We laughed to tears when my best friend and I double-dated with our mothers to see Start the Revolution Without Me. We laughed when she took a lunch hour visit to the jewelry department at Hudson’s, in downtown Detroit, and, after gazing at the precious settings, declared that she wasn’t interested in buying anything because “I just don’t feel like emeralds today.” We laughed every time my uncle told the story about the time my mother walked past the television one time the Lions were playing on Thanksgiving Day and proclaimed “That’s clipping” seconds before the ref flew the flag.

My favorite picture of Mom is from my wife’s and my wedding. The photographer captured a moment with the three of us standing together. Someone had apparently just said something funny, and my mother’s head is thrown back in a gleeful laugh, without a care in the world, brimming with delight.