Sunday, I watched the Mets lose to the Giants. Not quite the Mother’s Day gift this baseball fan was hoping for, but at least my team put on a good show, especially with many of them swinging pink bats. They lost by an honorable 6-5.

The pink bats were Major League Baseball’s tribute to Mom. They’ll be auctioned off (along with commemorative plates with pink breast cancer awareness ribbon logos) to benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Before I take a swing at this act of charity, let me offer a preemptive defense: My argument is not about breast cancer, a horrible, heartbreaking disease. I’ve seen on my own friends and their dear ones the toll it takes. I believe even more money should be spent researching new treatments and a cure. Also, the Komen Foundation seems to be an exemplary organization. Lastly, I gladly buy all sorts of products, from pink silk scarves to pink containers of Dry Idea deodorant every October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, to support the search for cure. The other 334 days of the year, I offer what support I can.

So now let me ask why it is that the people at MLB think about doing something for Mother’s Day, they immediately come up with the equation Women = Breast Cancer. If the idea is to honor Mom by doing something to ease female misery, how about reaching out to those suffering from ovarian or endometrial cancer? Or AIDS? Or, to get away from the women-as-diseased paradigm, assisting women who are victims of domestic violence, or those caught up in the nightmare forced labor or sex slavery?

Hello, people who bring us the All-Star game! How about recognizing that a great hats-off to mothers would be to celebrate us as the champs we are – or at least as potential winners. MLB could fund athletic scholarships for women, or buy sports equipment for girls’ high school teams, or put its muscle behind a push to get women’s baseball as an event in the 2016 Olympics.

Why not auction those bats to provide those strong mothers with special-needs kids some respite care? Or offer free seats, hot dogs and beer, along with no-cost transportation to stadiums to low-income women as part of an MLB GNO?

There’s so much good that needs doing in this world. Next Mother’s Day, I’d like two gifts (besides those from my family): To see my Mets win. To applaud Major League Baseball as it celebrates us by taking off its bubble-gum-tinted glasses and recognizing we have issues beyond breasts – and that its female fans are as multifaceted, strong, and high-minded as the guys swinging those pink bats.

Ran in Huffington Post on May 12, 2010

There are literary writer/saints, of course: my saint-in-chief being Jane Austen with Charlotte Brontë floating on a cloud only slightly lower.  And over there is Charles Dickens.

Then there are my personal writer/saints, other writers who have shown great heart and generosity when doing absolutely nothing would have been fine.

Today Jennifer Wiener is right up there, having given my new presence on Facebook page an absolutely unsolicited endorsement on her wall: Susan Isaacs (aka my favorite writer in the world) is on Facebook! If you like me, you’ll love her. And wow, can she get readers’ attention.  It’s so great when an author whose work you admire turns out (like Jennifer) to be a saint as well.

My other saints?

Rona Jaffe and Jackie Collins who gave me my first blurbs.  Unsolicited.  Well, unsolicited by me, because at the time I wrote Compromising Positions, the only novelist I knew was me.  I suppose my then-editor, Marcia Magill, sought out their good opinion with a “Hey, here’s a lively but lonely first novel that needs a friend” letter.

Then Danielle Steel, bless her.  My third novel, Almost Paradise, received a lot of praise.  It also got one scathing, über-bitch of a review from Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times…such a stinkeroo that to this day I cannot bring myself to reread it.  Anyhow, out of the clear blue, I get a charming letter from a writer I’d never met (still haven’t), Ms. Steel, saying how much she enjoys my work.  She urged me not to let a rotten review get me down.  Just keep writing.  Her note was the perfect antidote to that “Life is unfair, so why bother writing and critics are loathsome vampires sucking the life out of the authors because they themselves are dead” self-pity.

And Linda Fairstein.  Here she was, head of the Manhattan DA’s sex crimes unit at the time, writing fiction, living a life so full it would exhaust five normal people.  I was working on Lily White then and needed some insider information; the eponymous main character had been an assistant DA for a time and I needed some texture to give her work a feeling of authenticity.  I asked Linda if I could have five minutes…just a few questions.  “Five minutes?” Linda asked incredulously.  “You’ll need more than that!”  We wound up having a long, informative, and incredibly delightful lunch at Odeon where I marveled at her knowledge and energy.  And at the end, she insisted on picking up the check.  Is that a writer/saint, or what?

Lawrence Block and I were having dinner with our spouses one night when I was in a funk (aka profoundly depressed) over not being able to get the right voice for a novel that was due in…it’s vague, but probably in a few months.  I opened up to him.  Then, instead of the normal “Oh, I’m sure everything will turn out fine” routine, he asked me a series of writerly, analytical questions.  I answered each one, and, by the end of the conversation, realized I was seeing the work I had to do more clearly than I ever had.  Then Larry said something like, “Sounds like you know what to do.”  I said I thought so.  “It’s what you always do,” he added.  Trust my instincts.  Don’t over-cerebrate.  Just write the fucker.  And so I did.

Bless them all.