For all the mothers, on this Mother’s Day

My mom’s in a nursing home now, and no matter how hard I try to kick it, I can’t help but feel like the bad son.

When we pick her up on Sunday for a Mother’s Day lunch, I’ll feel the weight of guilt. Don’t tell me otherwise. In the culture that raised me, having your mom in a nursing home just isn’t done. Yes, I know it’s not rational. She’s 90 and she needs expert care.

But she’s feisty and funny. She talks politics and, since she was born a daughter of the British Empire, she’s also quite worried about Queen Elizabeth II. She’s always loved the monarchy and Churchill for keeping England together during the London bombings, from the time she was a girl in Guelph, Ontario, listening to the war on the radio.

At some point during lunch, I expect she’ll tell us what drives her mad.

Bad manners.

“If there’s one thing that drives me mad it’s bad manners,” she’ll say. “When I see people with their elbows on the table, chewing with their mouths open like cattle, sawing at their beef, grabbing the fork as if it were a spear,” she says, flaring her nostrils. “It drives me mad.”

Yes, mom, I know.

Yes, Yia-Yia, we know, the boys will say.

She is a stickler. There is a proper way to serve tea and not be ostentatious about it. And if you dared put open jars of jam on the table and stuck spoons into the jars to serve your guests, you might hear the word “barbarian” from under her breath. And you’d regret it. Forever.

And the nostrils would flare. Because we call her Yia-Yia, some readers mistakenly think she’s a little old Greek widow with an accent, as if from a Greek yogurt commercial. She’s not. But she has let her hair grow white.

She speaks Greek and English and the two cultures have created in her a sense of propriety: stand up when your guests arrive, turn off the TV, greet everyone by name, look them in the eye, write thank-you notes — those are just a few.

To do what’s expected. To not do what isn’t done.

This sense of propriety, this melding of two old cultures, the fear of shame and certain knowledge that a family’s name, its honor, aren’t just about words, have been forged in her like some alloy of steel.

When my father died, Betty insisted she come to live with us. And so she spent 25 years with us, transferring all her knowledge to my wife and sons. How to cook, the respect for traditions and guests. And I wonder: How many people have been as lucky to have several generations in the same home?

We were lucky. And I was lucky as a boy on the South Side of Chicago, on Peoria Street, with our extended family living up and down the block in two-flats, multigenerational. A tribe.

Betty didn’t want me to mention it, but a wife and mom in the same home for 25 years was a challenge, especially for me, when they’d tell me what to do.

I’d say, the mayor, the governor, the Outfit don’t tell me what to do. They’d just laugh.

But there are also untold benefits. Some people move as far away from family as they can. When the children come, they keep a distance. I’m not judging them. I just can’t grasp it.

I asked the boys what their Yia-Yia has given them.

“Her cooking, her teachings about the church,” said one.

“Her lessons on morals and manners,” said the other.

And both mentioned the stories.

When Betty was finishing her master’s and I was all-in for the Tribune at City Hall, mom would feed the boys breakfast in their highchairs. We’d forbidden TV, so she’d tell them stories. She was always a great storyteller. She wanted to be a journalist until she tagged along with an older reporter on a story that involved the great Joe Louis boxing a drugged bear at a county fair.

Louis had been a hero of hers — she’d heard his fights with Max Schmeling on the radio, Louis for America and Schmeling for Germany — so to see Louis boxing a bear in a dirt ring soured her on journalism forever.

But she did tell the boys stories — of the Three Little Pigs, of Childe Harold and the Goblin King, of the early Christian martyrs. And Russian fairy tales because they were so exciting, and stories of Odysseus and his faithful dog Argo. She made sure we had the full collection of the “My Book House” books.

I’d once written a column about how important that 12-volume collection is, but I can no longer find it online.

She’d tell stories of our family: of my dad, plowing his fields with a mule named Truman, and the night the Carabinieri came for him during the occupation. And an elopement in the village where her father was born, which brought out the men with guns and lanterns. And tales of revenge, and of Christ and the Greek Orthodox church.

And the story she told my brothers and me, she also told my sons, about the thief about to be hanged who asked to kiss his mother goodbye and bit off her ear, explaining she let him steal an egg — then a chicken, a goat, a cow, a horse, and then gold.

Yes, there is a proper way to set a table. Some had Martha Stewart to teach them. I don’t know if many even care these days. Perhaps all that is lost in the culture now, to be searched for like the Grail, as if manners are hidden treasure to be discovered again.

All our mothers teach us what’s important. And what’s important to them might just become important to you.

Happy Mother’s Day.