A bet she couldn't resist

For $100 could I stop flirting with men when my mom is around? And could she stop talking about my contact with mortality?

"Why don't you eat?" my mother told me, her Yonkers accent ringing out in the otherwise hushed Chinese restaurant. A 77-year-old Italian-American hairstylist who believed almost any problem could be solved with a bunch of spaghetti and meatballs, she considered my lack of appetite a red flag.

"I'm fine", I said. "My sesame chicken just tastes weird like pepper."

She pointed out our server. "My son can't have spice," she said, "because of his leukemia."

Although I survived cancer when I was a young boy, I now risked death from embarrassment. At 40, I had grown accustomed to my mother's overprotection. From an early age, I understood that as her youngest child of four and the only one to endure a life-threatening illness, she and I would always be bound by love and fear.

I accepted the way she would slather me in sunscreen at the beach, even in my teens. And I couldn't resist when she insisted on accompanying my trips to elementary school or accompanying me to class on the first day of college.

Still, I always hated how she constantly talked to others about my illness, especially now when it made it seem like I was still sick.

"Mom, I've been in remission for 30 years," I said. "Why can't we just move on?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't realize I was making you so uncomfortable."

"I told you a hundred times I didn't want to talk about it anymore. " I said.

"You should be proud to be a survivor. Why are you acting like it's something you're ashamed of?"

She may have been right, but I had never been comfortable discussing what I had been through. In many ways, fighting the disease was easier than dealing with its long-term side effects: the nightmares of sharp needles stuck in my spine; the pain of being teased at school after my hair fell out; worrying that a visit to the doctor would tell me that I was no longer in remission.

Although my mother's antics made me blush, I was jealous of how she seemed to handle my illness better than me.

The first time I was admitted to the hospital at age 5, my mother got stuck between the doctors and nurses and would put on a lab coat and draw blood from me if they let her. Over the next few days, she hovered over medical students, guiding them on which veins to use. “Not the ones in his right hand; they squirm,” she would say.

She smuggled in pizza and bologna sandwiches when I refused to eat the hospital food. At night, she twisted herself into a human pretzel to sleep in a half-broken plastic chair next to my bed.

While I cared about the sheets stiff or the irresistible smell of rubbing alcohol, she urged me to think of the hospital as a sort of summer camp. I didn't buy it - beepers and blood transfusions were a far cry from archery and swimming - but she always did her best to keep the mood light.

When I spent my 7th birthday in the cancer ward, she filled my room with balloons and cupcakes. After I complained that I couldn't go to Disney World like my friends, she took a dusty globe from the nurse's station and twirled it next to my bed, promising to take me someday I wanted to go. As the nurses took me to treatments, she continued with the travel theme and pretended to board a plane.

"Be careful of my luggage," she said. "He's irreplaceable."

In retrospect, I could tell it wasn't easy for her, especially with my dad working long days on construction sites to pay my medical bills. She gave up her favorite activities, like her Thursday night bowling league, and had little time for herself as she juggled my needs with my older sisters' first dates and high school graduations.

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