DocAndersen
When I was a little kid, I was sick a lot. I got pneumonia and bronchitis every winter for at least four years. I was never scared. Why? My mom was a nurse. She always knew what needed to happen. She taught me first aid from an early age. I learned to quickly look at an injury and determine what I needed to do. My mother was always a calming influence. I won’t say that there weren’t times when my mother and I butted heads. We did; both of us similarly see the world, sometimes the point of intersection can be inflammatory. But the thing that I most recall from my childhood about my mother was that she was calm. She didn’t panic or run around screaming.
When the time came for us to leave Indiana and go to Thailand, I wasn’t nervous. It was a huge change, but I wasn’t worried. When it came time to get on a bus and go off toa school that was 30 miles away from the hotel, we were staying in. I wasn’t scared. Mom was always there. It is funny when you look back at your life; you remember things. I remember my grandfather dearly. I remember my grandmother, fondly. I struggle and have memories of my father’s father, but those are fewer. I have more memories of my father’s mother, but there was less of a connection there. My mother is like her father; my grandfather was a person I understood at a very early age.
In part because mom was like him. I talked about mom teaching me to cook. Today a different story. One year the local Paper had a mother’s day contest. I spent time crafting a poem about mothers to submit to the game. One evening the phone rang at the house and mom answered it. It was the Paper; my poem had been selected as one of the top entries for the mother’s day contest. We didn’t win, but we were in the top 3. Mom later apologized, “I wasn’t what they were looking for” is loosely what she said. But it wasn’t mom losing; it was simply that we got to the top 3. I am proud of the person that my mother was, is and will be. I couldn’t care less if we won that content or finished in the last place.
I am proud of my mother!
This work is Copyright DocAndersen. Any resemblance to people real or fictional in this piece is accidental (unless explicitly mentioned by name.
