I have been wearing my mother's pajamas. Baby blanket yellow flannel covered with pastel blue butterflies, they're hardly what I'd have bought for myself. But somehow, scuffing around the house in her slippers and jammies comforts me.

Barbara White Stack is an editorial writer for the Post-Gazette (412 263-1878).

When she died, I didn't cry. I slipped into caretaker mode, which requires steeling myself so I can hold up other people. I'd caught my dad years before when he'd collapsed at my little brother's funeral. I was really worried about him now.

Still, my surviving brother and sister seemed so much more crestfallen than me. Maybe I was a Vulcan.

Maybe I didn't love her as much as they did. After all, they'd stayed and I'd moved away. Aggressive, competitive and loud, she totally dominated me. They were strong enough to resist her. But I had to live hundreds of miles from home to become confident.

The funny thing I've found, though, is that I couldn't live with my mother but I've had difficulty this past year living without her.

She'd wanted me to be the stay-at-home child. Home was a one-story, three bedroom concrete block house in Bucks County, a half mile down Farmers Lane from Grand View Hospital, which was good because my rough play resulted in repeated emergency room visits. My mother's plan was for me to study nursing at Grand View's school then work at the hospital, living at home all the while.

My plan was to be a writer. I went to journalism school, met my husband and after the first summer, never returned home to live.

My mother opposed my marriage at a young age and my moving away, though she'd moved even more hundreds of miles from her mother.

Immediately after my wedding, she began pestering me about kids. When was I going to have kids, she'd ask.

Slow down, I just graduated and got married, I'd reply.

Don't wait too long, she'd warn.

Geez, I'm only 20. There's plenty of time, I would shoot back.

Kids are more important than anything, she would insist.

How in the world could kids be more important than my really cool career?

Mom had quit her job as a teacher for a dozen years while her kids were little, and there was no way I was going to do that. Later, she'd managed to work full-time and hold down the fort with three teens and a little one. There's no way I could do that with the overtime I was putting in.

Then my sister had two babies. And my friends started having babies. And my co-workers had babies. If they could do it, I could, too.

My first labor was horrible and long and painful and scary. But the moment I held my newborn in my arms I thought, "There is nothing better than a baby! I am getting another one of these."

Not that my mother was right or anything.

My second child was a girl. She looked like me, as I looked like my mother. Photos of each of us at one year are strikingly similar, blue eyes, brown hair, round face, big grin.

Like me, and so many little sisters, my daughter did everything she could to steal attention from the oldest. On my son's 7th birthday, for example, I had to warn her that if she didn't stop running around and screaming and poking him, she'd get a time out.

My 3-year-old responded that if placed on time out, she would take off all of her clothes. That's what she did, much to the amusement of everyone at the party, precisely the reaction she'd sought.

When I recounted the birthday story to my mother, she said I richly deserved this child.

"What?" I asked, indignant.

"We didn't call you Bad Barby for nothing," she said.

By the time my daughter was a young teenager, she had me whipped.

I called my mother to complain. Surely my sister and I never behaved like this, I said.

"Are you kidding," she asked, "Don't you remember the things you did?"

I tried. But no, I couldn't. I could imagine her rolling her eyes at that. "You made me cry on many an occasion," she said.

I was stunned. She cried?

How weak was she, I wondered. I swore my daughter would never make me cry. I was in charge. She was the child.

Conflict between us intensified over the years, though. One night after she'd defied every rule, and I confronted her, she screamed at me, "I hate you!"

"I hate you, too," I yelled back, though I'd sworn no matter how many times she threw that acid at me, I'd never splash it back in her face.

I turned so she wouldn't see the tears.

How weak am I?

Not weak enough, my son says. He is graduating from college and planning to move away. His father wants him to come back and live with us, but he says he's got to go.

We were discussing it in the car one day. He said he needed to get away so he could be himself. And, intending to put it in a kind way because he's never mean, he explained, "You've got way too much testosterone for a woman."

Oh.

Like mother like daughter. And maybe granddaughter.

My mother and father had always traveled to my house for Thanksgiving. Mom would help me make her grandmother's yeast rolls and her godfather's cherry and pecan mold.

She wasn't here this year, so I had to risk raising those rolls myself. As I was puttering around the kitchen Thanksgiving morning in my robe, the lining of one slipper fell out a hole in the toe. My feet are a size larger than my mother's so my toes had long ago popped through the ends of her slippers. Now the left one's lining was flapping out the tear.

I sat on the floor and took it off. Repair was hopeless. I started to cry. My mother had worn out and died, and now her slippers. Soon, I knew, holes would wear through her PJs as well. Soft as it is, flannel is not the toughest material.

I sniffled my tears to a halt as it occurred to me that the slippers didn't really matter. Even without them, I can't stop myself from walking in her shoes.