Celebrate Mom Day!
I started this morning, much as many mornings, getting some knitting time in. It’s a nice gentle way for me to start the day. Sometimes, I listen to an audio book. At other times, I watch a YouTube video with one of my favorite indie media channels while knitting (yes, to multi-tasking!). Today, I was just knitting in the bedroom as Kaboom was flopped on the bed. Without the audio or video to accompany the knitting, the mind wanders.
I thought about last night’s Butte Democratic Central Committee fundraising dinner which I attended (I’ll be writing something about my speech at the dinner maybe for the next blog post). We heard from Addison Winslow, the lone member of the Chico City Council, a young man who was proud to wear his values openly on his sleeve. Despite being a college town, the Chico City Council is dominated by conservatives who therefore get to set the agenda at council meetings. Despite being the one minority, Addison maneuvers his way the best that he can, standing up for issues that he believes in such as stopping the Valleys Edge Project. He also shared the organizing work to get more progressive young people elected to the city council. He also introduced several of them to the, let’s admit it, mostly senior citizens who made up the audience (yes, including me!). I thought how proud Addison’s mom must be!
My musings shifted to my own son, James, who does not have a political bone in his body. Despite having the gift of gab and impressive public speaking skills, one can’t get James roped in on anything political. When he was in junior high he attended the youth cohort of the White Privilege Conference in Wisconsin. He wrote a speech the night before and delivered it the next day. His oratory skills were such that his speech was featured for 2+ minutes of a 7 minute promo video for the conference. James is also quick on the uptake and can give razor sharp rebuttals in a heart beat. He has the skills and talent to be a politician. But alas, he has no interest in it whatsoever. He was a junior statesman sponsored by the American Legion Post 471. He says that was just about all that he can take of politics. Instead of getting inspired, it swore him off it! He is a knife expert and a budding watch collector. He’s happiest when he can engage and expound on either of these topics with you. His interests are vastly different from mine.
And that made me think about how different I was from my mom. Mom’s father was a math teacher before switching careers to be a 3-term mayor of our town in the Philippines. Mom, however, did not have any math gene in her body. She considered it an accomplishment that she was able to graduate from college without taking any math class! Alas for her, there was a required statistics class in her masters program. By then, she had me and I was a freshman in college attending the same university where she was getting her masters. I, on the other hand, got my grandfather’s math genes and was studying for an engineering degree. Serendipitously, mom’s statistics professor was my physics professor. So what does a mom do? She wakes up her daughter early Saturday mornings, takes her to the class, and have that daughter tutor her on statistics afterwards. The happy ending is that mom managed to scrape by, passed the class, and got her masters degree. Mom is now approaching her 88th birthday and sadly suffers from dementia. I am thankful that she can still recognize and know us. But the memories are fast fading.
I figure that each year I can look back fondly at memories like these with Mom. And each Mother’s Day that I celebrate with my son is a treasure. Mom and I are different, much like my son and I are different. How about you? How different are you from your mom? That’s what makes our families much more interesting, no? The diversity within families is just as fascinating and varied as the cultural, racial, and other identities that we have. It is this diversity that brings richness to our lives. Let’s celebrate these differences as we celebrate our moms.
Happy Mother’s Day celebrations all!
