Mom
I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot lately.
She is both the easiest and most difficult topic to write about. Easy, because there is so much I love about her, so much I know about her, so much of her in me. Difficult, because I don’t know how 5 or 6 paragraphs on the internet could ever do her justice.
As a child, I would get embarrassed, impatient, cranky, when my mother would strike up a conversation with the grocery store cashier, or the receptionist at the dentist, or the pizza delivery person. Who cares about these people, I wondered. We have places to be, I would think, as I rolled my eyes and tugged on her sleeve. Today, I envy her ability to make someone feel like they are the only person in the room. To make them feel like their story is important. Because she wasn’t just making them feel that way — to her, it was important.
She could talk to anyone. She asked all the right questions — she was polite, inquisitive, curious. She was never invasive or nosy (unless the topic of conversation was my siblings’ love lives). And she remembered. She somehow could recall all the names and ages of the daughters of our childhood dentist’s receptionist.
She made it her mission to give my three siblings and I the perfect childhood, because hers was lesser than. She succeeded. Every Christmas, she would write these heavily detailed and imaginative letters from Santa Claus by hand and leave them on his milk and cookie tray for us to discover when we woke up. She never forgot to reward a lost tooth, leaving us with personalized gifts each time, preserving our innocence for just a touch longer. Sometimes I think she is partially responsible for my creativity — she encouraged us to dream, and imagine, and believe. She instilled in us a belief that there is magic in the world. She still does.
She is the most thoughtful person I have ever known. She is the queen of spending time, energy and money into a gift that is perfectly suited to the recipient — something they didn’t even know they wanted until they laid eyes on it. I have been told that I have inherited this trait, but I don’t believe that’s true. I’m just imitating what I was shown, what I grew up with. How I was raised.
When my best friends came to visit me as a teen, I would discover more about them during a 15 minute conversation they had with my mother than I had in an entire school semester. I would joke that people came over to spend time with her and not with me, and feel twinges of irritation when she, in my opinion, monopolized their attention. Back then, I didn’t realize how lucky I was.
She instilled in us a belief that there is magic in the word. What she doesn’t know is that for me, that magic can be found whenever I come home at Christmas and find her in the kitchen, her apron, her hands, and even sometimes her face covered in flour. I feel it when she tries to tell a joke but accidentally messes up the punchline. I see it when she laughs too hard at a movie that is not very funny. When she dances to Earth, Wind and Fire and tells the story of her wedding reception.
In her late twenties and early thirties, she walked around with 4 toddlers, only two years apart from each other, and made the conscious choice to stay home with us until we no longer depended on her. And we were a handful. I am now in my late twenties, and at the risk of sounding like a product of my generation, I have to admit that most days I am too selfish to take care of a plant.
Instead, I have chosen to devote my time and energy into building a career, have prioritized my educational and professional goals. At 27, I am happy with my choice. At 27, my mother was married and expecting her first child, my eldest brother. It is difficult not to make an obvious comparison. During a particularly heavy period of self-doubt, I asked my father if he thought perhaps she resented me, or the fact that I had more time, more options than she had had at my age.
There was no hesitation in his response. He began shaking his head before I had even finished asking. “There is no doubt in my mind that she is nothing but proud.” I believed him.
The other day, my partner called me warm. My mother’s warmth is her greatest trait. She has no right to be that warm, or that kind, or that thoughtful. Not only does it make the rest of us look bad, but it also turns the idea that people are a product of their circumstances right on its head. And yet, she is the warmest person I have ever known.
It is because of her warmth, her kindness, her imagination, her spark, that I am who I am today. I had someone whose actions were so easy to mimic, someone whose personality traits I have embraced when I finally figured out they were in me too. I grew up with the greatest example.
I never know how to let my mother know how grateful I am for her. But I suppose this is a good start. Happy birthday, Mom.
