Lessons from Mom

[DanleyJ]

My Mom taught me how to survive some tough breaks in life. Married at 19 and widow at 31 with 6 year old and 2 month old boys. In 1953 she had some hard life decisions to make. Single working mothers were kind of frowned upon in the ‘50s. She moved in with her sister and her husband and two girls while she went to Cosmetology school to become a hair dresser. Moved to her home town and had a salon installed in a front room of our house so she could work and be a stay at home mom at the same time. We had family help from my Grandmother and a couple Aunts in town and she set to raising her two boys without a father until I turned 13 when she met my step Dad (also a great man see the Dad thread). She had about 10 good years until her health took a bad turn. I think her cancer had a lot to do with exposure to all the chemicals she had to work with in her beauty shop doing perms and desolving hair out of brushes. There was always a heavy chemical odor in the shop. Then there was about 15 more years of surgeries and battling cancer on and off. Through it all she kept her Christian faith alive and her work in her church touched many, many people’s lives. She had many good close friends. However, she was not perfect. She was not very good at picking a good match for her boys. She had her heart set on one of my old girl friends for me but I took another route and married the right girl I wanted for me. She never quite took to my new wife and my wife knew it. And it caused some friction until her passing. I like to think Mom had a talk with the Big Guy upstairs when she realized what a great gal I had married, because a month after she passed, my wife became pregnant after we had tried for 15 years to have a child and had pretty much given up. So, today I have a great 15 year old daughter and a 30 year marriage that still has some life in it. And I can still hear my Mom saying “stick with it, and good things will come.”

[Neil K Walk]

My mother is 77 and lives 400 miles away. I think she still worries about me more than I worry about her. She was widowed while I was an infant, lost her parents when I was a toddler who chose not to get remarried and went back to work as soon as I started going to school. I remember the early years of her searching for meaning in life and finding it in questionable places but if there was something valuable to learn from her methods it was that there is nothing better in life, it's to be yourself no matter what others say - though she takes it to an extreme and might as well live next to a certain river in Egypt. I've done the opposite and learning that with some people you can't put toothpaste back in the tube.

Don't get me wrong, I think she's self centered and maybe a bit cracked but I envy her for it; she is who she is, not what somebody else tells her to be.

[Blueshoes]

My mother always did the very best she could, the same can be said for my father.
They were human, they made mistakes.
These are the lessons I learned from them both.