ALL GROWN-UP AND WISHING FOR MOM.

Byline: Joseph Honig

MOTHER'S Day, this cooked-up, Madison Avenue, greeting card holiday, hits me like a freight train to the heart.

Too many commercials and come-ons of happy, intact families.

Too many images of beaming children offering candy, flowers and trinkets to warm, smiling women at splendid dining tables.

Too much fanfare and hokum about brunches and lunches and all those marvelous ways to tell Mom she's wonderful.

Don't take this the wrong way. I am not opposed to sentiment. Not an unfeeling, cold-hearted fellow. Not me.

I am simply another fiftysomething face in the crowd who lost his own mother so very long ago. And misses her, terribly, still.

Grown men need mothers, too.

I was 17 when she died - in front of me, of a brain aneurysm - and have experienced marriage, fatherhood and success without her.

Something was always missing.

I have also suffered terrible losses and disappointments. Without her.

And something was always missing.

For there were times during adulthood - in my 20s, as I went out into the world, in my 40s, as I struggled and failed - when I felt an emptiness like no other.

Someone who knew and loved me with astonishing, unquestioning strength was gone. She was a picture on a mantle. The memory of a voice and laugh. A young woman in vintage home movies who will be young forever.

There was so much to tell her. So much to say about jobs and romances and faraway cities to which I'd moved. So many friendships and journeys to share with her. A life of wish-you-were-here moments lived with the feeling that good times, music and wine would have been sweeter had she stayed in this world.

Grown men need mothers, too.

I needed mine to help unlock the mysteries of women. To look into what I became and what I wanted and save me from chasing worthless dreams. I needed her humor in dark, awful times. I needed her reassurance that life is unfair but not always unkind.

So many years without her now. I have gone gray and lined and have seen far too much of how this world breaks trusting hearts. From here, I see my mother as she was: a lovely, rather uncomplicated woman who, without much complaint, got far less out of life than she wanted. She was smart but did not eagerly pursue knowledge. She was hungry for friendships that did not always bring happiness. She had watched her own parents battle and divorce, ultimately deciding that nothing would break our home apart.

Yet there's so much I don't know. So much I lacked the language or experience to ask. I was a kid. Because there comes a time - if everyone lives long enough - that children get to know their parents as adults. I never had that time. Never had the years to know what was deep in my mother's heart when our family suffered crushing bad luck. When there was heartbreaking sickness. When times were prosperous and seemed they would stay that way forever.

In photo albums and portraits, I stare into the eyes of a small blond woman in her 30s and early 40s - she was dead at 43 - and wonder, helplessly, what she would think. Of this life I have made. Of the future I plan. Of the sparkling, preteen grandchild named for her.

My mother always encouraged me to tell her everything. I did the best I could. Thus she knew of classes and teams and books I loved. She knew the prettiest girl in school accepted my invitation to the junior prom. She understood I was sorry when we fought and never meant to hurt her feelings.

She will, however, never know of endless walks on countless streets when I imagined she was by my side. When I looked up at the stars and told her of an award, a lost job, a wedding, a divorce and the sudden realization I was no longer young.

Grown men need mothers, too.