In honor of today being Mother’s Day in North America (we moms in Sweden have to wait another couple of weeks for our day in the sun), I thought I’d post an article I wrote a few years ago about my mom.  It was first published in the now-retired ‘zine, Mosaic Minds, and some of my long-time readers may have seen it there back then.  It’s always been one of my favorite pieces, and even if it’s not new to you, I think it’s well worth a re-read.

A Shining Example
The older I get, the more I can feel myself becoming my mother. I think like her, I sound like her, and in the glimpses I catch of myself from the corner of my eye when I pass a mirror, I even look like her. I realize this is a common enough phenomenon for women in their thirties, but what’s not so common is that it’s not an unpleasant feeling for me.

When I was a junior in high school, I was assigned to write an essay about the “person I would most like to emulate.” Part of the assignment was to make a list of people I admired and over a week or two narrow the list down to the one person who would be the subject of my essay. I had a bad habit of doing the very least amount of work it took to get by–my idea of “getting by” was getting A’s, true, but I did it with the bare minimum of effort–and I thought that making the list was a waste of time. It came to me after a few days that I would write in my opening paragraph that no list was necessary for me, as there was only one possible subject for my essay: my mother. There were two advantages to such a plan: first, it would save me the dreaded task of compiling The List, and second, it made for a clever introduction that I knew would tug at my teacher’s heartstrings from the get-go since he was just the kind of teacher who fell for that sort of thing.

Of course, the essay was a roaring success, just as I knew it would be, and the teacher went so far as to ask me to read it in front of the class as a shining example of hero worship (okay, so he didn’t actually say “shining example of hero worship,” but I could read it in his eyes). Since then my stock answer to the question “Whom do you admire most?” has been “my mother.”

It’s tempting to write this article as so many other “heroes and role models” articles are written, full of descriptions of and praise for the admirable deeds of the author’s subject, but I think that would be taking the easy way out once again and I want to dig deeper this time. I admire my mother not because she sacrificed so much for my brothers and me, but because we grew up not knowing how much she sacrificed for us. Through her example I learned a lesson I didn’t know about or understand until I had children of my own: having children means making sacrifices, period, and good parenting means raising one’s children free from the burden of responsibility for those sacrifices.

Superficially, my mother’s story is like the story of so many other women of her generation: married young, three babies in four years, a few years at home with the kids, then the big D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and suddenly you’re a 27-year-old single woman with a houseful of kids, your highest level of education a high school diploma, no significant work experience, and consequently not much in the way of employment potential. My mom did what smart, strong women do in these situations, and she took care of business. I’m sure it must have been an almost-unbearable struggle at times–I know how hard it was for me when I was a single mother myself, and I had only one child to my mother’s five (my two cousins also lived with us when I was a kid), and I had a secure, well-paying job–but she never, and I mean never, complained about any of it.

I know she must have commiserated with her friends from time to time, but we kids never heard a word of how tough she had it, and that’s what matters. She never acted as though her life were full of hardships and she never made us kids carry around emotional burdens that were too heavy for us to bear. What she did, instead, was teach us how to play baseball in the backyard, show us how to catch and carefully handle snakes in our huge vegetable garden, take us fishing, swim with us in the Clearwater River, and take us camping many times every summer in the mountains behind town. Imagine being one adult who willingly loads up a ’69 Chevy Nova with five kids, two dogs, and two weeks’ worth of camping gear and supplies, then heading up to the mountains to rough it–we’re talking no tents, no camper-trailer, no electricity, no running water; just her and us and the great outdoors. She also taught us by example to be strong, smart, compassionate, independent people in our own right.

To this day, my mom has never talked much with me about the trials and tribulations she faced while I was growing up. Most of what I know is what any adult person would know when looking at the situation objectively: it had to have been hard as hell and then some. When I look back, I can’t help but marvel at how my mom was able to turn what could have been years of misery and desperation into an idyllic childhood filled with love, security, and happiness for us kids.

Since I’ve become an adult and had kids of my own, I’ve come to appreciate even more the gifts my mother gave me. If I could come even close to being the kind of mother she was and is, I’d consider my kids very lucky. I know now that the essay I wrote when I was 16 years old fell far short of being a “shining example of hero worship,” and I hope I’ve done a better job this time around. No matter how good they are, though, mere words can never do my mother justice.