My mum stayed at home after I was born. She had held steady jobs before that—gift wrapper at Filenes, assistant at the company my Dad worked at (how they met) and an assortment of other paid work.
She stayed home with me until I entered high school. (When I entered high school, she took up a part time job down the street at the Collector’s Office.)
I judged her hard for staying home as an angry teen. I thought she was a bore to be at home—I wondered “what are her goals? what is she working towards? why won’t she just leave me alone?” I was filled with all these fancy notions of what one should be doing, because I knew everything as a tween.
In her “spare” time at home, she minded many of my cousins while their parents worked, and she was always hosting sleepovers and adventures for scores of my cousins. She cleaned, she tended my endless strep throats, she volunteered with our church, she volunteered at the Kiwani club, she drove me and my friends everywhere.
My mum was cool. I just didn’t know.
My mum’s core was service and caring for people—people she knew well and people she didn’t know at all.
As I walked out of my office yesterday, I wondered—was that a conscious decision?
Did she realize that she could give so much more heartily of herself in her proper way, without being tethered to a 9-5 job?
Did she realize that her special contribution would be so much more powerful than any sort of job she might have chosen?
Did she realize that she was changing peoples’ lives in a deeper and more profound way than she would have in any other way?
I am talking only about my mother specifically here, not you, your mother, or your mother’s mother. I believe her gifts were so much freer to have an impact without the confines of a day job to clock into. She was free to watch children, whatever children they happened to be, to help out.
This was her gift:
Mum had the ability to make every person she met feel special, in an instant. She remembered everything—this was, just as often, a burden, as she could hold a lethal grudge—but it also included her ability to remember birthdays, anniversaries, children’s favorite toys/books/sports/ice cream. She was a living fountain of love.
And I gave her no credit for it while she was still alive. Ah, what a fool I was. Stuck on living those wild and fancy dreams and growing out of the humdrum of minding people, walking the dog, volunteering, and whatever other boring things Mum was doing.
Mum had nonchalantly committed to and lived fully what’s truly meaningful in life.
She was flawed—angry, capricious, often fire and brimstone as a mother, sister and wife—but she got it. She got what it took me 33 years to get, and she didn’t preach by anything other than her actions.
And I’m so so very grateful for what she taught me, even if it has taken me this long.