They celebrate the other Mother’s Day

By Casey Gillis

Published: May 10, 2008

Pat Bevington and her daughter Dee stay in constant touch.

They talk on the phone several times a day, Pat from her home in Lynchburg and Dee in Richmond.

Over the years, Dee has moved around a lot for her job, and she and her mom have decorating-by-phone down to a science. They send each other fabric and color samples, and buy the same home décor magazines and books for their shared hobby.

“We’ll flip through the pages together,” says Pat. “Over the phone and the computer, we decorate each other’s houses.”

It hasn’t always been this way for the tight-knit pair. When Dee was growing up, they never had any major issues, but did deal with that typical mother/daughter tension.

“I wasn’t always Dee’s best friend,” Pat says. “She thought she knew it all, and I thought I knew it all.

“When you’re going through the teen years and the college years, you kind of think you’ll never see eye-to-eye on things.”

That changed as the years went by.

“The older you get, the more you appreciate what your parents have done for you,” Dee says. “I don’t know if it’s that you’re older and wiser, or you see them getting older, and you don’t know how much time you have left.”

To show that appreciation, Dee and five of her closest friends have been arranging a mother/daughter bonding day every October since 2004.

In a way, Pat says, the day has turned into an early Mother’s Day celebration for her and Dee. She also has a son, Todd, who lives in Richmond now, too.

When Dee and Todd lived out of state, “they (would) try to get back for Mother’s Day,” Pat says. “(But) they’ve got mothers-in-law. We’ve never made a real biggie of flying in for Mother’s Day.”
Dee says the whole idea for the gathering came about by accident.

All six of the daughters met each other in 1994 when they worked together at an insurance company in Roanoke. Several of them were eventually transferred, but they all stayed in touch.
In 2004, three of their mothers were coming to Roanoke for a visit on the same weekend.

“They hear us talk about each other all the time, and (we thought) it would be neat if they met,” Dee says, so she invited Pat and the others did the same with their moms.

The girls planned an evening’s worth of activities for their mothers, but didn’t reveal any of it until they’d all assembled.

“We knew nothing about this at all,” Pat says. “I had no idea where we were going and what we were doing.”

The night began with wine and appetizers at one of the daughter’s homes, continued with a limo ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway and dinner and ended when the daughters shared a poem they’d written together about their moms.

“We all cried,” Pat remembers, adding that the poem hangs on her bedroom wall. “I read it every week when I dust.”

Each daughter gave her mom a bottle of wine with a special label that read “Special Wines for Special Moms.”

That first gathering was so successful that there was really no question they’d do it again.

“They were so pleased with it and so touched, (that) we said, ‘We can’t stop now,’” says Dee.

“We love doing it for them. My mom’s done so much for me. It’s so nice that we actually get a chance to give back.”

Since then, they’ve continued to gather in Roanoke for one Saturday every October.

The activities vary, as do the gifts Dee and her friends create for their moms. One year, they put together a video full of baby pictures and old photos of the moms, set to sentimental songs. Another time, each gave her mother a container full of personalized M&Ms.

The nights usually include a fancy dinner, followed by a play or more bonding time over board games.

There’s just one rule: the moms must leave their wallets at home.

“We’re not allowed to pay for anything,” Pat says. “We’ve all tried, but the girls get mad at us.”

Says Dee: “We always overrule them.”

The first time everyone met, Dee says the mothers were polite and reserved around each other.

Not anymore.

“Now they pick on each other,” she laughs. “They’re just like us (daughters).”

Pat says she and the other moms — who live in Florida, California, Detroit, Connecticut and Roanoke — don’t keep in touch throughout the year, so they always have lots of catching up to do.

“We babble like crazy,” she says. “For some reason, we get together, and you would think we live next door to each other.”

They have a lot of laughs but, inevitably, there are some tears, too.

“It’s such a sentimental time, knowing that our daughters want to do this for us,” Pat says.

“(Dee keeps) saying, ‘I owe you so much.’ But I say, ‘You don’t owe me anything. It’s a mother’s job. That’s what a mother is supposed to do.’”

Pat wishes she had thought of the idea a long time ago for her own mother, who is now 94 and lives in Ohio.

“I look back now,” she says. “And I think, ‘I’m so far away (from her). Why did I think we couldn’t do something like this?’”