It’s just a bed.

A little twin bed with a tendency to creak too much for our daughter’s liking.  It’s also way too small, according to Amanda, who is prone to exaggeration and has been dying for a new one for the last few years.

I remember when we all used to be able to fit in that bed. The whole family would  climb in together – Amanda, Rick, me and even Alec, who usually ended up falling into the crack between bed and wall and had to be rescued.

Much thought was put into buying that bed. We went to several different stores, my thought that it had to fit into a little girl’s room but be grown-up enough that if she wanted to take it with her to her first apartment, it would still be OK. I actually thought that.

It’s oak, with a white wash so it sort of matches her dressers, which also seemed important then. And it has an arched headboard and footboard with simple vertical slates and a trundle bed underneath that is concealed by fake drawer fronts. That also seemed important, the sleepovers.

The dressers were already there, one with a dressing table on top, which we bought with a matching crib. Amanda was two and a half and fine with her crib. Never jumped out or even tried. But the new baby was due in a few months and as custom dictated, the transition to the big-girl bed had to be done before little brother arrived (so the older kid wouldn’t resent the baby for pushing her out of babyhood and one day rock him so hard while they were sitting right next to the new bed that he bucked his head back and needed stitches).

Oh wait, that happened anyway.

Amanda was excited when we bought the new bed. Knowing me and the fact that I was eight months pregnant, I’m pretty sure I cried or at least wanted to as Rick dismantled the crib and put this giant piece of adult furniture in my baby’s room. The new baby would get a more neutral hand-me-down dresser and crib from his cousins, so Amanda’s would be packed up and sold.

We bought bright yellow sheets to go with a multi-colored comforter, which also seemed a shock to the system after the pastels of babyhood. Rick took pictures of Amanda lying in the new bed in her purple zip-up footie jammies, arms behind her head on the new yellow pillow, knees propped up and looking like a teenager.

She was so proud.

But not that smart.

In the morning when she woke up, she forgot she was no longer restricted by a crib and like she had been doing, called for us.

“I’m up,” she yelled. “Daaaddy, can I get up?”

Of course, my husband being my husband, couldn’t resist.

“Nooo,” he called back, both of us terribly amused that she didn’t know she could get up on her own.

I believe in some states, this would qualify as child abuse.

Rick was usually the reader and would lie in the bed with Amanda for at least five to 10 minutes before I’d find both asleep. As she got older, that bed was where I’d get all the very important news of the day that she was too busy or too bothered to tell me in her upright hours and would now be too horrified to share in the same detail.

It was also the bed where all the sleepovers took place, the first of them and in truth, most of them, her brother Alec making the trip over from his room next door.

She turned 14 on Saturday, after what we all decided was at least 18-19 months of being 13. And in a weak moment, with no other birthday present to offer and a very good mattress salesman doing his thing, we broke down and bought a new, truly big-girl bed.

This one has no real character, just a queen-sized mattress, box spring, metal frame and a headboard they “threw in” for $89.  And I’ve scarcely seen Amanda more excited.

It arrives tomorrow morning. So tonight, Rick is dismantling her old one and getting it ready for a potential buyer. Last night he took a picture of it for Craig’s List and we both remembered the last one we took with the purple footie jammies.

Hopefully, anyone interested will not mind the little dent where Alec’s head banged into it. Or the glued-in knobs on the head and footboards, so Amanda would stop pulling them out.

Maybe they’ll have sibling sleepovers in it too, and hear the same giggles late into the night as we did.

I will try not to cry as he boxes it up, mostly because everyone in the house will make fun of me.

Or maybe I’ll just go somewhere they won’t hear me.

Storytelling, I have decided, is sort of the verbal hieroglyphics of a family, the color added to the commentary; the explanation for the picture of your brother dressed as a princess at age four long after everyone has forgotten it ever happened.
 

After a couple dozen re-tellings, stories take the place of actual memories. They fill in all the gaps.
 

My mother was a fabulous storyteller. So good that at some point, she simply took over my father’s own childhood stories, which were clearly lacking, and told them herself.
 

She’d recall detail from 50 years earlier, what she was wearing, the precise dialogue, the emotions she was feeling at the time. But if there was any chance at injecting humor into a story, which was pretty much always, you never knew where the facts left off and the improv took over.
 

As a true child of the Depression, she told us of her father Morris, a loving,  hard-working housepainter, and her mother Bess, a woman scarred from her own abandonment as a baby, moving from apartment to apartment on the West Side of Chicago, to escape landlords after rent money often gambled away by her mother.
 

But even this my mother would recount without a trace of melancholy. Like the roller skates she rented for seven cents an hour with her best friend Rhea – “I paid four cents and she paid three,” my mom would explain, “because Rhea was really poor. Her father was on relief.”
 

It was my grandfather Morris who would take my mother, his youngest of three girls, for a canoe ride on the lagoon. “He bought me a sailor suit,” my mother would recall lovingly. “And then we’d row out to the middle of the lagoon, I would throw up over the side and then we’d row back.”
 

There was also the one about her goldfish, which swam round and round in its bowl on the kitchen window sill until one day, with a hot summer sun pouring in, “it jumped out,” my mom said, “and committed suicide.”
 

“Committed suicide?” I asked.
 

“It was the Depression,” she’d say with perfect timing.
 

She told these stories even as her short-term memory faded. The dress she was wearing when, while playing stickball, the neighborhood bully pushed her down, imbedding gravel in her knee. The Chinese doll — her only toy ever, she said, I think to inject the story with some added color — given to her by her beloved older sister Pearl. The game she played under her mother’s dinette, the tablecloth concealing her grown-up, make-believe life in “Chi-Town.”
 

They were her memories, but somewhere along the line they became mine, as clear in my mind as if I lived them myself. And yet why couldn’t I remember the final words she spoke that made sense? The last time she looked at me and knew it was me. For a while, I beat myself up for not having the good sense to ask her more questions while she was still able to answer them.
 

Like how did she make her brownies so light and cakey? How did she always know the right thing to say to make us feel better?
 

How were we supposed to fill in the gaps without her?
 

I miss my mom today.
 

Seniority always rules on Mother’s Day. You may be a mother, but your mother or mother-in-law is still the guest of honor. And if her mother is still around and at the party, she is the queen.
 

This is how it should be. You are your parents’ children until they are gone. And then you are the adults.
 

Thank God for my mother-in-law, because I am no more ready to be guest of honor at that party than I am to be queen.
 

But I think I’m finally comfortable in the storyteller role, able to conveniently make up details to fill in the gaps whenever necessary. And thinking of my mom every time I do it.
 

I never knew her father Morris, but it was his humor that everyone remembers. And it was our grandfather who surely passed it on to my mother and her sisters, a trait imbedded in me and my siblings and my children, a gene I pray will sustain my grandchildren and their grandchildren for generations to come.
 

“Did I tell you about the time my father came into our apartment dragging a long rope over his shoulder?” my mother said, and of course, I pretended she hadn’t.
 

“I was so excited I couldn’t stand it,” she began. “He kept pulling and pulling on the rope. ‘Daddy, daddy, what is it? What is it?’ And then finally, at the end of the rope, was an adorable, scrawny little puppy. I named him Spot.”
 

“Spot?” I would say. “That was the best you could come up with?”
 

“It was the Depression,” she would reply, seemingly the perfect answer for anything. “What did I know? Can I finish the story?”
 

“Sure,” I said.
 

” ‘Oh daddy, I love him, I love him,’ I said, and I was so excited I jumped up with the one roller skate and stepped on the dog,” she said calmly. “And that was the end of Spot.”
 

“What do you mean, the end of Spot?” I asked, horrified. “You killed the dog?”
 

“Well,” she said, reconsidering, “he was never really the same after that.”
 

I loved my mom.
 

It will be two years in August since we lost her. But they’re still her stories.
 

And still her Mother’s Day.

Wild thoughts go through your head when you’re pregnant, scary thoughts like, ‘Why should I cave in to societal pressures and not sprinkle pretzels on top of my pie a la mode?’
 

Once you have the child, other fears take over, many irrational. When my daughter Amanda was born nearly 14 years ago, I was seized by one in particular. Awakened in a sweat in the middle of the night, it plagued me.
 

What would I do if her hair grew to a length where it became necessary for some sort of accessory or other apparatus?
 

Thankfully, by the age of two she wouldn’t let me near her hair. But at one point when she was four and her bangs weren’t long enough to keep in a ponytail, I suggested a double pony and, being four, she went along with it, resulting in kind of a Carrie Fisher, Star Wars look I believe they’re still talking about at Banner Day Camp.
 

When my son Alec came along nearly three years later, I figured it would be a snap. No hair anxiety. And I could at least appear much more competent.
 

So I went to work. When he was three, I dissected his throw.
 

“He’s throwing fine,” my husband said. “Leave him alone.”
 

But I didn’t care for his follow-through and the little hitch in his stride.
 

“He isn’t hitching,” my husband said. “He just got big-boy underpants. LEAVE HIM ALONE.”
 

But I persisted. And by age eight, he was still so conflicted by my earlier attempts at coaching that it took him approximately five minutes to release the ball, which often traveled the length of his leg.
 

“YOUR fault,” my husband would say, pointing at me.
 

This pretty much sums up motherhood for me.
 

Blame and guilt.
 

But I joke, of course.
 

I look at my daughter now, about to graduate eighth grade and so achingly close to adulthood, and all I can see is that scene in my bedroom not long after taking ownership from the hospital. Just her and me, the first real time we were alone after my husband returned to work and visitors left, a moment so frightening that I truly wasn’t sure if I could do it solo.
 

I remember thinking I was not normal, that the baby is supposed to come out and fall into your arms and you are supposed to be crazy in love without a second thought. You are not supposed to look at this person like the stranger she is, someone whose painful sounding cries confound you and turn you inside out.
 

I stuck in a cassette tape that someone had bought us with all the songs featuring her name. “Hey Amanda,” the man sang, “sing along with me. Shake, shake, shake it, like a monkey in a tree.”
 

And so I shook, shook, shook it, singing and dancing around the room with my new dance partner, losing all previous traces of cool and self-consciousness. She was a new toy for me, and I for her, and we were feeling each other out. She wanted to cry, I’m sure of it, but she picked an ideal time to stop.
 

I laid her on our bed in just her diaper, and for the first time really looked at my baby, inhaled her, kissed her deliciously soft skin up one side and down the other, shed my fears and fell, at that precise moment, madly and passionately and forever in love with my daughter.
 

I look at my sweet Alec, whose heart beats inside my own, who seems to feel my joy and my pain and I, his, more acutely than anyone. I remember the first day of kindergarten, when the children were asked to stand and introduce themselves to the class, the teacher leading the way by standing and saying, “Hello, my name is Mrs. Singer.”
 

And I remember her pointing to Alec, and my shy little boy taking his turn first, bravely getting out of his chair and proudly announcing, “Hello, my name is Mrs. Singer.”
 

The adults giggled and Alec blushed and then he slapped his forehead and said, “I always do that.”
 

What a sport. What a kid.
 

What an amazing thing motherhood is.