Thinking back, what do you admire most about your mother?

My mother grew up in a family with three sisters, two older and one younger, and a brother four years her senior.  She lost her Mom when she was just twenty-four years old, still three years away from marrying my Dad.  They would have four boys and one girl over a ten-year period, which included two miscarriages.  She was an accountant and an aspiring actress and gave up both to raise her family.  Being way more familiar with being around girls, I imagine raising four boys was so very different and I’m glad she had at least my sister as a female companion.  She passed away a few months after my two youngest brothers graduated college and Dad retired from General Motors.  We had Christmas in 1985 together, never imagining it would be our last, and she slipped into a coma before New Year's Eve.  We stayed with her in the hospital and she never woke up.  Late on Sunday, January 5th we left, needing to get ready for work on Monday.  It was so like Mom not to want to be a bother to anyone.  She waited until she was alone to pass away.  People told me that she had an express lane to heaven, that’s how nice and sweet she was.  I couldn’t agree more.  I lost my Dad on July 25, 1989, just three and a half years later.  Not many people lose both of their parents by the time they’re thirty-three years old, and I envy those children that have their parents to talk to way later in life. 

Later, as I became a father and like many others look to their parent's voices, living or deceased, for guidance, I reflected on what my parents taught me.  It’s almost impossible to recall specific events over three decades, but after I pondered for a while, I boiled all their parenting into two themes.  My father taught me to be responsible, to keep promises, respect others and understand the consequences of my actions.  My mother, and to answer the question posed, taught me to be happy.  Not specifically the how’s or what’s, but that I had to consider that my choices could not always be selfless, that some of the things I did had to be what I wanted and that I had to find the right balance in life that would make me both happy and responsible.  My parents never specifically said it this way, but that’s what they did and why I admire them so much.  Their own sense of values and morality was worth far more than any expert’s book.

Being responsible is the collection of actions that guide your choices when it comes to dealing with others.  Being happy is the collection of actions that guide your choices when it comes to dealing with yourself.  Taken together they form the twin goalposts for my life.  So while their time on earth was relatively short, and I miss them dearly, I was so very fortunate that they were my parents.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tell me your favorite story about Moses

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.   Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favo...
Read more

Share some early memories of your son, Michael

Mike was raised by his grandparents in Pennsylvania until he was school age, so unfortunately I don’t have infant or toddler memories to share.  But from the time I first met him, and still true today, the thing that springs to mind is that he is a happy guy.  As he grew up he developed into a very extroverted, out-going child, loving to ride bikes around the neighborhood with a pack of friends, attend ice cream socials at school, and strapping on skates for organized events at Skateworld of Kettering.  We lived a quarter-mile from Indian Riffle Park and he loved the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds. Mike is a very determined person.  When he decided that he wanted to lose weight back in grade school, he controlled his diet, including eating cans and cans of tuna fish, to shed pounds until he was rail thin.  Then he decided to begin lifting weights and went after that with a passion, putting on solid muscle and eventually benching over th...
Read more

What things are you proudest of in your life?

I’ve written about some of the things I’ve built during my career while answering some previous questions but after forty-four years of dabbling in Information Technology, I accumulated more than a few.   One of my favorite sayings is “I’m glad I never learned I couldn’t do something” and the stories below begin with a pair of projects I undertook at Wright State University that few others would have even contemplated trying, followed by two situations where technical ability had nothing to do with achieving significant changes and finishing up with how I helped resolve a dispute without knowing anything about the subject being discussed. GOTHIC was a mainframe assembler program that read a single input card and printed out, sideways, each character using multiple lines of asterisks, creating large letters in a Gothic-looking font. Since the mainframe printers used continuous forms, GOTHIC was perfect for creating large fancy banners, many feet long, announcing birthdays or ot...
Read more