So there I was, struggling to meet a grant deadline when the sewer backed up, and what does my wife Lori do? She gets sick. Lori never gets sick, but here we were, the day before Mother’s Day, and she has to get sick. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I would be shot if I didn’t meet the deadline, but since I needed to answer Nature’s call, I decided I’d better work on the sewer first. I made our sons, William and Thomas, snake it while I urged them on, but no amount of exhorting worked. It was time to send Lori to get some drain opener. But noooo, she wasn’t feeling well. So off I went. All well and good, but who knew there were so many different types to choose from? And since Lori always reads the labels I hadn’t brought my glasses. I finally grabbed a bottle at random and headed home.

Though initially nonplussed to find I’d purchased fabric softener, I reasoned it might soften the clog so we dumped the whole bottle down and hoped for the best. Amazingly, it worked – but no thanks to Lori.

Usually mothers do their job. They cook and clean and stuff like that. But sometimes they don’t, and let me tell you, dads and kids really have to scramble to get them back on the job.

That’s what Mother’s Day is about – it’s annual extortion by moms. If we don’t give them cooking utensils or cleaning supplies every May we know what will happen. Lori obviously knew that I never go shopping until it’s too late to find anything good (this year the only Mother’s Day cards left were written in Estonian so I got her a graduation card instead – at least she could read what it said). I’m not dumb – I know she got sick to give me a taste of what would happen if I didn’t go Mother’s Day shopping soon.

My mother would never have stooped so low. Well, okay, that isn’t exactly true. Once, when my little brother and I were probably 8 and 10, my mother got sick and no amount of whining from us or my dad did any good. In fact, it had just the opposite effect — we wanted to eat? Okay, go to the grocery store and buy some food.

We only agreed to do so in order to stave off imminent starvation. We found a grocery store okay, and since my brother and I were used to shopping with my mother we knew where a lot of things were. We knew our way around so well, in fact, that my father split the list up so we could get out of there faster. Anchovies, cabbage, mustard, pancake syrup – we soon had everything we needed for supper.

But then, just as we were about to triumphantly enter the checkout line, my brother looked at our cart and said, “Dad, is that your purse?” My father froze, a look of complete horror on his face – we’d been putting things in the wrong cart. After debating for a few moments whether or not we should just go ahead and check out, we abandoned the cart and slunk away before we could be arrested for purse snatching.

When she finally got well, my mother decided our shopping debacle had been funny, so she wrote about it for the Omaha World-Herald. Soon the whole world knew how inept we were at grocery shopping. My mother’s brief incapacitation had proven her value, just as Lori’s had last Saturday. The Mother’s Day bribes keep flowing…