Here's my column this week, optimized for this website ’cause I put a lot of links in it. It's about my mother, pictured here making food for our break the fast/Yom Kippur family gathering. Notice the posting on her refrigerator.

Nasal Gravity
The ungrateful child gets a wake-up call.
by Liz Spikol

When you’re a kid, so much seems immutable: the smooth curve of the banister, the half-broken slate on the driveway, the way a mariachi puppet makes spooky shadows on the ceiling.

But families move, sidewalks are paved and puppets get trashed. And slowly it dawns on you: Things change. Shit.

I always hated change, so I had to develop adaptive strategies. My father shaved his mustache at the end of the ’70s (a good move for all men other than Burt Reynolds and Reggie Jackson), and I was traumatized. There’d been such reliability in that fuzzy caterpillar above my father’s mouth. Now he looked like an imposter. So I refocused on the immutability of my mother’s nose.

I guess I first noticed her nose when I was being breastfed. True, I couldn’t cogitate, but I was saying to myself, in baby English, “Goo-goo. Ga. Nose. Mommy. Nice nose.”

Her nose is startlingly pretty. It’s charming and adorable, fit for Ashlee Simpson. It’s pert. Teeny. When it comes to both sides of the family, my mother’s nose is a button among half-open penknives. It’s Margaret O’Brien at 6.

I almost had a heart attack when my mom said she was getting a facelift a couple years ago. I told her she was vain, and that I would not be tending her at the bedside. As it happened, that wasn’t much of a threat, as her doctor arranged for post-op care at the Ritz-Carlton.

How could one worry about a procedure that ends at the Ritz? If I ever have my appendix out, I hope they do it at the Four Seasons.

And she only had a partial facelift, which left her nose untouched. Later Botox injections weren’t my cup of tea, but I was content to let her fight nature’s cruel tide—as long as she didn’t screw with the nose.

Then came the news: The nose was a problem. It was dripping and gushing and doing unpleasant things noses shouldn’t do even though they’re clearly designed to do them.

I’d ignored the constant tissue in my mother’s hand for months. My grandmother had recently died, and I thought my mom was working through her grief by adopting one of her mother’s habits. Mah-jongg might’ve been more fun, I thought, but whatever. Grief is personal.

I should’ve known better. My mother didn’t even like her mother.

Something was up there in that perfect nose—something malevolent, maybe even cancerous, and it had to come out. Surgery again, but this time there’d be no hotel—not even a Comfort Inn.

I was consumed by worry and depression. I tried to squelch my anxiety by not getting out of bed, but the nightmares were awful. I went to the shrink after two days of misery, hoping he’d tell me I was depressed for other reasons. Instead he talked about imprinting and maternal centrality.

“Isn’t that a cliche?” I asked. “Does it always go back to the mother?”

“Usually, yes.”

“What a drag.”

There are only a few people who really count in the psyche, he explained, and those people are generally in one’s immediate family. Since my immediate family is especially small, even a small tear in the fabric could compromise the whole garment.

The night before the surgery, my mother called me. “I have to confess something,” she said, and I wondered if she was going to tell me I was adopted. “I nominated you for ABC’s Person of the Week. But not because I’m your mother—though I did write in my email that you’re my person of the week every week.”

Normally, I would’ve mocked her. It was the ultimate Jewish-mother gesture. But I was oddly touched.

When we hung up, I had an epiphany: I wasn’t worried about the nose. I was worried about my mother. Who else would ever love me enough to contact major news networks? Who’d be my cheerleader, fashion adviser and relationship counselor? Who’d understand me? And who’d save me if I went crazy again?

My grandmother’s dead. My father thinks I look like Cindy Crawford but is otherwise quite rational.

A mother’s lunatic worship, I suddenly realized, is a precious commodity. Those who have it think they’re being smothered, and they are. But what a strange thing to complain about: “Goddamn it. I’m overloved.”

This week I went to see my mother postsurgery, and I’m relieved to say she looks pretty much the same. They can do lots of digging in the nose without changing its shape, I guess.

I told her I was glad to see her nose’s perfection was undiminished, and then started complaining about my bowels. She listened and offered suggestions, and then we talked about Farrah Fawcett’s anal cancer. The segues were quite graceful.

When I left, I said I’d let her know when ABC called. I was tempted to get a dig in, but I restrained myself. I’m sure I’ll mock her next week, or maybe even tomorrow, but for the moment I’m glad she’s around and cancer-free.

A nose on any other face wouldn’t seem as sweet. I’m sure of it.

Fast Facts

>> Past ABC persons of the week: Tony Bennett, Billie Jean King, Jann Wenner.

>> First Mother’s Day: 1914.

>> Mother’s Day invented in: Philadelphia.

>> Number of American women who have babies each year: 4 million.

>> Median age of American women when they give birth for the first time: 24.8.