What I've Learned From My Mom

This is a request, but it's also something I was going to write anyway, because it was just Mother's Day and I'm about to go meet my mom for a belated Mother's Day lunch.  She spent yesterday with my dad at one of their favorite places, Longwood Gardens.  They've gone every year for several years now, but finally she saw the wisteria in bloom.  She told me all about it yesterday on the phone.  It looked like a wedding cake, she said, all the hanging blossoms, purple and white.  She said, I can't wait to blog about it. 

I love how open to delight my mother is.  She's amazed by the world.  She loves plants and dogs and birds.  Her gardens are a wonderful evolving treat, and she's got a sunroom filled with orchids.  There are birdfeeders and bluebird houses all around the fields at my parent's house, and so there's this sense of peaceful bustle, the timid commotion of dozens of tiny birds.  It's really nice to sit and watch them. 

I love how committed my mom is to being authentic, and to being happy.  She's not happy by nature, at least not in the easy, stable, base level of contentment that my dad and I have.  So it's tenacity sometimes, and a constant habit of self-examination, that helps her screen out the things that make her unhappy and identify the things that give her a sense of confidence and peace.  I love and admire that.  She's so articulate, and she's so determined, that she's really an intelligent examiner of social patterns and how they affect her.  She can't abide falseness and hypocrisy.  She puts herself out there, regardless of her audience.  She's one of the bravest people I know, because she's really sensitive to rejection, and yet she's never retreated into a fake or contrived persona in order to blend in or win approval.  That's pretty remarkable, if you think about it.  For Mother's Day I bought her the book "Authentic Happiness." She just finished "The Happiness Hypothesis," and liked it, and is taking an interest in positive psychology. 

I could go on for a long time about all the things I've learned from my mom.  She's a great reader -- voracious, and intelligent, and discerning, without being pretentious or a book snob.  She's a great writer, and it's her lifelong commitment to writing that I've inherited, despite my efforts to ignore or avoid it.  (And, if I may boast for a moment, she's currently got some interest in her manuscript, so stay tuned on that front....) She's kind and funny and curious about people.  She teaches ESL and is a literacy volunteer and I suspect very good at both.  But what I love is that everytime she tells me about that work she is focused on something she learned.  She's constantly learning, constantly being amazed and surprised by the world.  She's paying attention, and changing her mind with new observations.  I love this approach to life.  Thanks, Mom, for passing it along. 

Comments

[Notorious BLT]

Orchids and Bluebirds...

Sounds like a magical place.