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Where is your nose, Griffin?” my friend recently asked her little boy, baiting him into a show-and-tell exhibit.

The sweet, smiling toddler raised his right hand, gingerly aiming the tip of his tiny finger toward the center of his rosy face and stuck it directly into his right nostril.

Ah, motherhood ...

And so another piece of motherly advice was shared: “Don’t stick your finger up your nose.”

Moms have lots of wisdom to impart. Clean underwear in case of a car wreck? Check. No elbows on the table? Yes, ma’am. Treat others as you would like to be treated? A clas sic.

In the spirit of great motherly advice, we polled you, our readers, for the best tips from your mothers. Many common themes emerged, and some of you shared poignant stories about your

Read some and more of it online at www.news-record.com/mom

Practical advice

“Always smell the milk first!”
Mom:Doris Ella Frost
Daughter:Pat Ferrell of Jamestown

• • •

“You’ll be amazed how uncommon common sense is.”
Mom:Ann Crowell of High Point
Son:Chuck Crowell of Greensboro

• • •

“Most of what you worry about will never come to pass.”
Mother:Paige L. Hargrove
Daughter:Beverly Hargrove Williams

• • •

“Always pay your rent first. ... You can do without electricity. You can do without a lot, but always make sure you have a roof over your head.”
Mother:Mary Ellen Palmer of Burlington
Daughter:Christina Tolbert of Julian

• • •

“Life is full of choices and choices have consequences. Once you make the choice, the consequence has your name on it.” Mother:Lorry Walinski Daughters:Michelle Walinski and Jenna Lombardo

• • •

“Keep your knees together.”
Mother:Mabel Gann Lawson
Daughter:Laura Lawson Joyce of Madison

Good attitude

“Always remember, it could have been worse.”
Mother:Iva Bennett McCollum
Daughter:Gloria McCollum Carroll of Eden

• • •

“Be as pretty on the inside as you are on the outside.”
Mother:Alice Smith
Daughter:Christine S. Beaman

• • •

“No matter what you have to do in life, always do the best job you can do.”
Mother:Matilda Morris
Daughter:Betty Sutton of Greensboro

• • •

“Actions speak louder than words.”
Grandmother: Sadie Sampson Carlson
Mother:Adaline Carlson Ruckdeschel
Daughter:Lisa Ruckdeschel

• • •

“Trust in the good Lord, do the best you can, keep a smile on your face, and you’ll go places!”
Grandmother: Maggie Winberry
Granddaughter: Debbie Faircloth of Greensboro

• • •

“It’s not what happens to you in life, but how you react to it that is important.”
Mother: Virginia Page Renalds Griswold
Daughter: Katie Latta of Burlington

Honesty is the best policy

“If you always tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said.”
Mother: Fannie Law
Daughter: Martha L. Webster of Madison

• • •

“Never break a promise to a child.”
Mother: Rose Goldrick
Daughter: Mary Eastwood of Greensboro

• • •

“Right is right if nobody does it, and wrong is wrong if everybody does it, and right ain’t never wronged nobody.
Mother: Pearl Kendrick of Eden
Son: Dennis R. Kendrick of Jamestown

Do unto others

“The people who are the hardest to love sometimes need our love the most.”
Mother:Mary Lou Elliott Cain
Daughter:Connie Cain of Greensboro

• • •

“You are no better than anyone else and no one is any better than you are.”
Mother:Easter Lee Pitts
Son:Ronald J. Pitts Sr. of Greensboro

• • •

“If you don’t act against wrongs, then you are just as guilty as those doing wrong.”
Mother:Rosa Roberson Donathan
Daughter:Jessie Donathan Howard of Greensboro

• • •

“There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, so it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.”
Grandmother: Gladys Harris Anderson
Mother:Virginia A. Smith
Daughter:Lynda Denise Tatum

• • •

Mom: “Do you like everyone you meet?” Son: “Well, no.” Mom: “Then how do you expect everyone to like you?”
Mother:Sheila Percival of Ottawa, Canada
Son:Blair Barton-Percival of Greensboro

• • •

“When someone is unkind and hurtful to you, do not wish them ill will, just pray they will spread their wings and prosper elsewhere.”
Mother:Geneva Harrison
Daughter:Debbi Harrison Hinson of Greensboro

• • •

“Don’t make fun of people, and treat people like you would want them to treat you.”
Mother:Ruby Butler
Daughter:Debbie Butler

• • •

“Always be kind and respectful to everyone because you’ll never know if you’ll need that person in the future.”
Mother:Delores Robbins Coleman
Daughter:Carolyn Simms of Greensboro

Contact Janet Brindle Reddick at 373-7370 or janet.brindle@news- record.com. Her mom, Jean, is still giving her lots of good advice after all these years. Happy Mother’s Day 

Don’t stay mad at Daddy

Barbara Picola Pickett, who now lives in Durham, got some important advice three years ago from her mother, Mary Anna Foxx of Greensboro.

She had been quarreling with her father and vowed not to speak to him again.

Foxx gave Pickett some time to cool off and then offered, gently, “... But that’s your Daddy.”

Weeks went by. Finally, with her mother’s voice in the back of her head, saying, “That’s your Daddy,” Pickett called her father, Robert Monk.

They worked things out on that Sunday, Aug. 5, 2006. They also talked about Pickett’s upcoming November wedding.

“I reminded him about his tuxedo,” she recalls. “We both apologized and laughed.”

Then on Monday, about noon, she got a call from her sister. Her father had had a heart attack and was dead. Pickett is grateful to her mother for the gift she gave her — the chance for one more talk with her father.

“My mom loves me best”

Edie Cooke grew up as the youngest of seven children.

A running family joke for the children and their mother, Audrey Dailey, centered on which child she loved the most, especially after their father died in 1976.

When Cooke was about 35, her mom passed out presents to all of the kids. Inside each of the seven boxes was a toilet paper roll holding a bumper sticker that read, “My mom loves me best.”

A few years later, Dailey was having surgery. She was groggy as she was recovering. Cooke figured that just for fun, she would ask her mother now: “OK, Mom. You can tell me. Which one of us did you really love best?”

Her mom answered simply: “Whichever one needed it the most.”

Mother, daughter discover poem together

Karen Moore of Greensboro, was going through some old photos one day with her mother, Kay Cockman Levan, when she came across a hand-written poem called “My Mother.” It had her mom’s name at the bottom.

Levan took the sheet of paper with hand-painted flowers and looked over the words.

She said it was a poem she had written about her own mother, Mary Hazelwood Cockman.

Moore was stunned. She never knew her grandmother because she died of a blood clot in her lung when Levan was only 16.

And Levan had never shared any writing with her before.

“But mom loved music,” Moore said of her mother, who died in March 2007.

The poem, written in three stanzas of nine lines each, was never set to music, but the family treasures it as a gift.

Moore and her brother, Lane Levan, have since realized that their mother wrote the poem when she was 52 — the same age Cockman was when she died.

My Mother

Many Many years ago when I was just a child
God called to His heavenly home,
my dear sweet mother.
Why, O Why, I asked the others
Did He have to take My Mother?
My heart was aching and my eyes filled with tears.
O Why, I cried? She was so young in years.
I just could not understand
Why He took her To That faraway land.

As the years have passed,
I understand at last
Her work on earth was through.
Needed was her voice in the Angels’
choir. He knew.
She’s singing around His Throne
Those songs she loved so dear —
Amazing Grace, Sweet hour of Prayer,
And Love Lifted Me.

Thanks to God’s love for me
My mother’s face again I’ll see.
I’ll hear her voice so sweet
When in Heaven we shall meet.
O Listen — don’t you hear the angels
singing and those golden bells a ringing?
Love Lifted — Love Lifted me.
O What a beautiful place to be,
And there my mother I will see!

By Kay Levan
Written on May 3, 1989