Whining, Wine-ing & Winning

This morning, before the craziness woke up and before being demanded a morning bah-bah, I sat with my first cup of coffee and thought about my mom.

She calls me “sweetheart.”

She calls her grandchildren “sweetheart.”

We call her JoJo, a name my oldest cousin started that stuck somewhere between baby talk and family legend, but I call her Jo-Mamma — partly because it makes her happy (I think), partly because it makes me laugh, and partly because no matter how old I get, I’m still her kid.

And she still answers like she always has:

“Yes, sweetheart?”

When I was little, she watched Disney movies with my brother and I like it was her job, because it was. She never rushed the songs, never skipped the slow parts, and never acted like she had somewhere more important to be.

Before everything lived on phones and cloud storage, Jo-Mamma was already documenting our lives like a one-woman production crew.

She recorded my brother and me on a tape recorder, holding a little microphone up to our faces for tiny “son and daughter interviews” like we were celebrities on a press tour.

“What’s your favorite color?”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“What’s your favorite food?”

“Do you love your mom?”

Somewhere in a box, our small voices still answer.

When the Disney Channel had a free preview weekend, she recorded our favorite movies onto VHS tapes.

She borrowed her boss’s video camera for birthdays, school events, and square dance reviews — capturing wobbling routines, crooked decorations, and the kind of ordinary moments that quietly become priceless.

At the time, it just felt like Mom being Mom.

Now it feels like love preserved on tape.

She still calls my boy dog “she” and my girl dog “he” with absolute confidence — like she’s personally rewriting biology and daring anyone to argue.

Her best friend Zada is part therapist, part co-conspirator, and part keeper of family stories that get more dramatic every time they’re told.

And then there’s Shirley — the friend who cusses like a sailor, laughs like thunder, and proves every proper woman needs one wildly inappropriate best friend to keep life interesting.

Jo-Mamma loves puzzles. The real kind spread across the table and the invisible ones life hands you. She’ll sit for hours fitting pieces together, patient and steady, like she knows eventually everything finds its place.

Growing up, though, she had a special talent for leaving puzzles in the most inconvenient places — the kitchen table when dinner needed to happen, the card table during holidays, and once (I’m still not over it) RIGHT where everyone needed to gather together.

Then I bought her a puzzle board for her birthday.

It changed her life.

And, if we’re being honest, everyone else’s too.

Now her puzzles travel neatly from table to couch to safe storage like the organized hobby of a woman who has evolved… but still intends to finish every last piece.

And when she isn’t solving a 1,000-piece landscape, she’s solving everyone elses problems.

We play Monopoly Go together, calling each other not to chat, not to catch up, but strictly to trade stickers like high-stakes negotiators.

“Do you have an extra lighthouse?”

“I’ll send it if you send the canoe.”

Meanwhile, Candy Crush has the power to derail entire conversations.

I can be mid-sentence sharing something heartfelt and suddenly hear silence… followed by:

“Hold on sweetheart, I just need one more move.”

And honestly? I respect the commitment.

She has also spent a lifetime calmly navigating situations that would send most people into a full emotional evacuation.

Like the time we were flying home from Mexico.

I may have enjoyed vacation… enthusiastically. At some point between last call and boarding time, I wandered off like a confused spring breaker with no survival instincts.

Meanwhile, Zada — calm, patient saint that she is — waited on the plane while my mother guided me back through the terminal like a slightly uncooperative luggage cart.

No yelling.

No panic.

No dramatic speeches.

Just steady Jo-Mamma energy and a quiet:

“Stay with me, sweetheart.”

If there’s one thing Jo-Mamma has mastered, it’s calm in the face of my personal chaos.

I have always been… emotionally enthusiastic.

Okay fine. Emotionally unstable on a good day.

I cry at commercials.

I spiral after WebMD searches.

I once diagnosed myself with three rare diseases and dehydration in the same afternoon.

I am, at best, a part-time hypochondriac and a full-time overthinker.

And somehow she has spent my entire life responding the same way:

“You’re okay, sweetheart.”

No panic.

No dismissal.

Just steady reassurance from a woman who has watched me survive every imaginary illness and emotional crisis I was absolutely certain would take me out.

These days, when I picture us together, I don’t picture rules or lectures. I picture a cabin porch in the mountains. Blankets around our shoulders. A bottle of wine between us like sacred therapy. A cold beer sweating on the railing.

We’re people-watching. Making up dramatic backstories for strangers. Laughing too loud. Not solving anything at all — just sitting in the comfort of being understood.

Because here’s what I know now:

She accepts me.

My loud laugh.

My survival-mode dinners.

My shit-show mom life.

My divorce.

My starting over.

My figuring-it-out-as-I-go motherhood.

She didn’t ask me to be perfect.

She asked me to keep going.

I like to think she’d sit beside me, read my blog, nod her head, and say,

“Yep. That’s my girl.”

Motherhood didn’t make me perfect.

It made me honest.

It made me strong.

It made me understand her.

She has guided me through airports, heartbreak, motherhood, and more wrong turns than I’d like to admit — always with the same steady voice:

“Stay with me, sweetheart.”

And this morning, in the quiet before the chaos, I realized something:

I didn’t just inherit her eyes or her stubborn streak.

I inherited her resilience.

And I’ll raise my coffee — and later, I’ll wine-d down— to that.