At Thanksgiving this year, my nephew took this picture of my 85 year old mom.
He sent it to me and I immediately thought #lifegoals. And not just because she’s my mom.
Gran, as her 12 grandchildren call her, is just about the happiest busy person I know. She volunteers at the daycare in her retirement community, runs the library there, is in two bridge groups, walks a couple of miles every day, does remote Nia and dance classes, reads voraciously, watches a joyful movie almost every night, and loves a good joke. Widowed just over five years ago, she still sometimes talks to my dad when she’s making dinner–she lives independently–but she’s not super concerned whether or not he can hear her. She’s voted in every election she’s been eligible to and she reads several papers every day. She loves her family above all, still sees her friends from high school every week, and believes strongly that we are all put on this earth to make it a better place.
Like me, she’s led a privileged life although it’s not been one without great sorrow. She’s lost a child, a husband, a brother, both parents, and many many friends. She married a month after graduating from college, had me two years later–we were living in Germany where my father was in the army–moved her family every few years until we finally settled in one place when she was 40. She raised four kids, got two graduate degrees, and has worked as a librarian for over forty years.
When I was young and battling the conviction that the world sucked, my mother’s optimism made me crazy. I thought of her, not without jealousy, as a Pollyanna. She responded to the cruelty and misanthropy of others by choosing not to let it matter. “I love my family,” she’d say. Or, “You can’t know the interior of other people’s lives.” She was and is too busy living to let life’s slings and arrows slow her down. (And, yes, I know many live lives that are intolerable. I am not one of them and thus I am able to have, as a life goal, something other than survival.)
Now, as I ease into old age myself, my mother’s way of living is my #lifegoals. I’m grateful for my relationships and I put them over almost anything else. I try and laugh at life rather than getting irate. I walk every day and thank my body for hanging in there. I hug everyone I can. I say “I love you,” as much as I possibly can. I volunteer, donate, and vote rather than argue and sink into hopelessness. I’m striving to follow the advice of Crash Davis and, like my mom, end each day “ …just happy to be here.” That’s what my mom’s done for the past 85 plus years and, damn, she seems to me to be the most enviable person I know.
How about you? Who is your role model? Why?
An utterly charming paeon to your wonderful Mom, Dabney. I suppose my role model was also my Mom but in a different way. She was some of the things your Mom has been but she was also an alcoholic with a professional career who made many bad choices in her life. I have tried to live up to her better character traits but also learned very early what bad life choices can do and so have worked hard to be sure I avoided them.
Hugs to you and to your mom.
That is a beautiful tribute to your mother!
My role model is my grandmother who arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 alone, at the age of fourteen from Slovenia. Her first job was in a match factory. She sewed dresses for me to wear to school and doll clothes for my Barbies. She taught me to cook and had a beautiful garden. She was full of joy for life and shared that with our family. A few years ago we went back and visited her village in Slovenia. I am thankful for her.
Mom’s seem to be a popular theme. My mom was amazing. Her mother committed suicide when Mom was 18 mo old (she found out her philandering husband had given her syphillus and she was pregnant again), and when the courts awarded custody to the grandmother, her father had her kidnapped from OK City (she was 2.5) and taken to his brother in Kentucky. She wasn’t allowed to see her OK relatives for years. She lived with her uncle and aunt and two cousins until she was 6, when the uncle forced the aunt to leave with the cousins in the middle of the night and leave Mom behind (he’d give her alimony if she left without trying to take my mom with her). Second mother lost. He immediately remarried another woman and they were both alcoholics who had vicious fights (physical) she often was made to sit through. She took solace in reading and her dogs. She was a lifelong avid reader and always had a least one dog.
When her uncle ran through his new wife’s money, she was returned to the OK relatives who sent her to boarding school in Texas. Around this time her father, who she’d rarely seen, committed suicide. She was about 12 when she went to the school, where she spent most school holidays as well, since her relatives didn’t really want her to live with them. She finally went to live with the grandmother who had originally been given custody when she was 15. Gran was a tough woman (I knew her well growing up) and she and my mom butted heads constantly. At 18 she eloped to LA and had a baby at 19.
Her husband abandoned her in LA with the baby and when she couldn’t find a job or a boarding house that allowed children, she asked for help from her relatives. they send her a train ticket back to OK City where she lived in a rental house they owned and got work as a secretary. She met my dad at a USO dance and they were married. SHe found out she was pregnant just before he was shipped off to Japan during the Korean War, and she wasn’t allowed to go with him. She didn’t see him for two years. She didn’t know how to drive and couldn’t work, so she was stuck at home alone most of the time with a preschooler and a very sick baby (bad asthma that sent him to the hospital several times).
What amazes me most about my mom was how resilient she was. She never had a good role model for being a mother, yet she loved us fiercely and seemed to be very inutitive about how to deal with us. She was a caring and compassionate woman, volunteering her time and always wanting to help others. She kept studying and learning about things all her life. She was an enthusiastic Nana to all her grandchildren, making them a priority, especially after my dad died in his 50’s from cancer. She was smart, loving, energetic, and just plain fun. She died in 2019, but we’d “lost” her before that to Alzhiemer’s. I miss her so much.
I’ll add that my husband’s mom was also a remarkable woman, smart as a whip and unconventional, given ehr very southern lady upbringing. When she passed a couple of years ago, my kids talked about how fortunate they were to grow up with two very different but equally remarkable grandmothers for role models. Needless to say, the two grandmothers were great friends, too.