Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.

Last year, I wrote a Father’s Day column. This year, it is my mother’s turn.

My parents were a team. As with many families in the 1950s and 1960s, my father was the fun parent and my mother was the one who made the trains run on time. From my father, I inherited the ability to tell a good story. From my mother, I inherited the ability and the inclination to tell my stories with good grammar.

For my father, fatherhood was not the most natural thing in the world because his father was not much of a role model. By all accounts, my mother had good and loving parents, but she was an only child. Thus, as soon as my first younger sibling arrived, my mother was in unfamiliar territory.

On top of that, my mother married my father when she was twenty-five years old after eight years in the workforce as a bookkeeper and part-time actor. In short, for my mother, as for my father, parenthood was a leap into the unknown.

My mother had many traits that served her well in motherhood. Even so, her story cannot be told without reference to her lifelong addiction to nicotine. I’m pretty sure I was smoking two packs a day during the nine months before I was born, and my mother continued to smoke until the day she died. The day before she died, she learned the hard way that it is a bad idea to smoke a cigarette while using bottled oxygen.

My mother was very well informed and loved to debate. She and I spent many happy evenings at the dinner table, after everyone else had cleared out, going back and forth on the issues of the day. For me, a stalemate was a victory worth celebrating. I asked her why, as an intelligent person, she didn’t stop smoking after the Surgeon General’s report in the 1960s.

She said she could have, but didn’t, because she’d be too unpleasant to be around while she was quitting. I replied: “So you’re saying that you kept smoking for us?” Game. Set. Match.

My mother’s tobacco story is a grim cautionary tale; she died at seventy-one, too soon to meet our daughter, her granddaughter. But there is so much I admire about my mother, and there are many positive lessons to be learned from her life.

My mother grew up on the East Coast and fancied herself a sophisticate. I suspect that she was horrified when she found herself, in 1960, living in Findlay, Ohio, where my father took a job. She made the best of it, reading the Sunday New York Times religiously, tackling the crossword puzzle and listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Sunday afternoons.

When I was in high school, my father traveled extensively for business, and even though she never learned how to drive, my mother kept things together on the home front splendidly.

After I headed off to college, my mother volunteered in the local schools, and despite having no formal education beyond high school, she became a skillful tutor of English as a second language for students from abroad.

After the coal company my father started went belly up, my mother went back to work, keeping the books in a doctor’s office, a job she held until shortly before her death.

Here’s my favorite mom story of all: During the last several years of her life, my mother had a bad stomach and couldn’t eat much. On one visit to my parents, Nancy Jo and I introduced my mother to sushi. She loved it and could digest it. We were thrilled, and my father brought my mother sushi once a week after that.

My mother died four months before our daughter arrived, and I am deeply sorry that the two of them never met. To patch that hole, just a little, my mother’s first name is a part of our daughter’s middle name. Our daughter can put away sushi like nobody’s business, and it gives me comfort to imagine my mother and our daughter — both lefties — going head-to-head in a sushi-eating contest.

So that was my mother, strong in dozens of ways, powerless against nicotine. To quote the title of my very first My Turn column back in 2022, “Two things can be true.”

Rest in peace, Carol Landis Potter. I hope everyone reading this had a happy Mother’s Day.