Mother’s Day is not just for those who are still around | Stu Bykofsky

My mother never hit me. No matter how much I might have deserved it, never. Not once.

That was Dad’s job, but he will stand down today, because this is for Mother’s Day, originated by Philadelphian Anna Jarvis.

Mom is no longer alive, but she is right here at my side. As my friends lose their mothers, I tell them that theirs, too, are close by. Mother’s Day is for them, too.

Never hitting me was the least important thing I can tell you about Jeanette Bykofsky, who left us in 2007 at age 89. Dad died eight years later at 98.

She was born in Harlem, at home, two months before the United States entered World War I.

Mom met Dad in the Bronx, shortly after Dad’s family had moved from Coney Island. His parents later returned to Brooklyn to open a bakery on Mermaid Avenue.

Dad met Mom through Sonny, her younger brother and my favorite uncle, a tough-talking, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, thrice-married, burly World War II veteran who worked for the Teamsters Union.

Dad bounced around a bit before finding his true calling with his beloved Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. He began as an organizer, became a business agent, and eventually managed a local.

Mom and Dad never dated anyone else, and each was dedicated to social change and justice, through the Socialist Party U.S.A. Its longtime leader Norman Thomas, who ran for president six times, was a family friend.

Early in their marriage, Mom and Dad struck a deal: He would save the world, she’d raise the kids. She had more luck than he. Except it wasn’t luck. It was love and intelligence and intuition.

When I was about 6, and furious about something, I blurted out, “I wish you were dead!”

Without anger, she sat down beside me and asked, “Do you really wish I was dead?”

When the enormity of the catastrophe I had wished for struck me, I burst into tears.

No such thought ever crossed my mind again.

Mom worked all through her life, mostly out of necessity.

Mom could type like the wind, take dictation, file, organize — no office skill was beyond her. The job that satisfied her most was serving as the entire office staff for the Socialist Party. The office was a large rectangular loft with rack fluorescent lights and wooden slat floors. She and the executive director sat nearest to the huge windows overlooking Manhattan’s busy 23rd Street, with files stretching back along the walls.

Mom was not paid much because socialists don’t have much. It was a labor of love.

Her other labor of love was the family — meaning my sister, Andrea, and me, until grandchildren came along.

Mom was as even-tempered as an angel. In rare moments of exasperation, she might mutter, “Oh, fudge!”

I can’t recall her ever complaining or passing judgment, unlike her son. When I got my first newspaper job as a critic, she said, “It’s nice you’re now being paid for something you’ve always done for free.”

Rim shot. But she was the peacemaker in the family, often putting herself between her husband and her son.

She always wore glasses, her hair tightly curled. She thought that she was not good-looking and that she could not cook. She was wrong on both counts.

On Sunday, go see your mom if she’s living. Have a chat with her if she’s not.

I’m doing that right now.