Mom’s Birthday

Today is my mom’s birthday, she turns 93, and oh, what a life! She is firmly in the category of, as Tom Brokaw wrote, ‘The Greatest Generation’.

She is struggling a bit these days, as you can imagine. The weight of so many years has taken its toll.

Her face weathered and wrinkled from an active outdoor life, her body bent and folded by relentless gravity, but the worst…her mind. A mind once sharp, holding a master’s in education at a time when many men questioned the need for women to have any higher education at all, let alone a master’s degree. A teacher guiding the next generation for nearly 50 years. 

Depressions, wars, health, husbands, kids, careers, running a family, it’s hard to imagine the fortitude required. And OMG the things she had to endure. Chickens in the kitchen, dogs, never-ending sports, cars torn apart everywhere, skinning animals in the garage, and a husband whose philosophy when I asked to do something was, ‘Go ahead but don’t kill yourself or your mother will give me hell’. 

She must have been just shaking her head.

As I’m writing this, I can’t help but smile, thinking back to conversations with friends, telling them about her when my sister and I were young. Loving for sure…a temper-yes, free speaking-yes, and let’s just say an aggressive discipliner. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is a suggestion she would have considered a mild guideline. 

I am spending more time with her these days, weighed by guilt that I should have been doing this sooner, and saddened when I see behind her eyes the confusion when she tries to come up with the names of her grandkids or others, that she knows down deep she should recognize.

Nevertheless, she is healthy, quick with a smile, and has a sense of humour about the world that has never faded.

I want to say so many things, but I struggle to find the right words in quantity or quality.

Abraham Lincoln helped me out:

"All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my mother."

Thanks, Abe, and: 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM!