For My Mother, Who Doesn't Visit This Website

Things about my mother:

1) she's done it alone
2) she's done it well
3) she's done it for two kids for 23 years (42 years if you count ours separately and then add them together)
4) she named me Becky because she thought it was a good southern name AND because Rachael (my pre-chosen name) (spelled "-ael" to mimic my father's "Michael") was already taken by my cousin
(I wouldn't have liked the extra "a" in there, anyway)
5) she tore her knee when she slipped on the kitchen floor once - she was holding infant-me and she held on to me as she fell, so she couldn't really grab anything to keep her knee from taking all the force of the fall. She had to get surgery for it.
6) she yelled at my 4th grade FOCUS teacher after the teacher had bitched me out for not alerting everyone else in the class that the cultural integration project due-dates had been moved up a day.
7) she took care of me through all the migraines and cramps and vomiting spells of my life
8) in fact, in my younger days, she let me sleep in her bed (on top of a towel in case I threw up again) after I threw up.
9) she let me wipe my tears-wet face (and sometimes my nose) on her shirt countless times after crying about dad
10) she must have prepared 88,000 meals for me and Matt by this time
11) she lets me drive when we go places
12) she lets me hold the remote when we watch tv together (which doesn't happen much)
13) she introduced me to the following Goldie Hawn movies:
Death Becomes Her
Overboard
Best Friends
and probably a few more
14) she flew alone for the first time in years to visit me in New York back in April
15) she only rented out my room while I was gone ONCE. It was some South African woman, and she was in there for the month that I was in Oxford, learning about literature and psychology. I'm not positive that my mother charged her any money, though, so you could hardly call it a "renting out" of the room.
16) she lets me drink alcohol - she's not like all the other moms; she's not a regular mom. she's a COOL mom.
17) haha that's from Mean Girls so please take it as a joke and not my own retardation.
18) she made a lot of clothes for me when I was little, and most of them were nice (notable exception: a t-shirt dress with ruffles at the bottom whose front was literally covered in buttons of all shapes and sizes)
19) she taught me roman numerals when I came home from preschool one day and I've never forgotten how to use them
20) she listened very attentively when I pretended to read Berenstain Bears and the New Baby to her, over and over and over again
21) she waited until she was 34 to have me, I'm assuming because she didn't want to have me at too young an age and then come to resent me for snatching away her youth.
22) she tells me to know that I am loved at least twice a day
23) she proves it to me at least all the time

so that's my mother in a 23-item list. Her birthday is the 23rd of October. So it's fitting.
I wish I had a nametag today (as I've had for the past two years) to wear that says "Hi, my name is I love my mom"

Fewer mother-themed entries to follow...