We’ve long known that it takes two to tango and a man and a woman to make a human baby. No one really knows why, though. There are theories relating to the pace of genetic diversity and the benefits of recombinational repair of damaged DNA, but they’re just theories.
So, what about dear old Mum? As I’ve gotten older I’ve stopped worrying about questions that can’t be answered—like why we don’t reproduce asexually. It is what it is and that’s a good thing if you let it be.
This has, quite unexpectedly, also changed my perspective about my mother and our relationship. She left us long ago, unfortunately, but her memory seems to grow stronger by the day.
She was “raised”, if you can call it that, in a dysfunctional Irish/Scottish family in pre-war Boston. Her remarried father worked in one of Boston’s then ubiquitous shoe factories while her single mother worked as a bookkeeper for GE. My mother, in turn, raised her two younger brothers, both of whom went on to become engineers with NASA during that institution’s golden age in the 60s.
She joined the US Navy’s Nurses Corps immediately following her graduation from high school and became a Registered Nurse. My father also joined the US Navy and served on a destroyer escort in the Mediterranean during the war. Following the war he went on to earn an accounting degree from Northeastern, the first member of his extensive French Catholic family to ever attend college.
My mother wasn’t Catholic, however, so my grandmother refused to attend their wedding. Strange how my own daughters seem to believe that religious intolerance is something new.
My siblings and I were all Boomers, and ultimately part of the new middle class that defined the post-war era. My mother took a hiatus from nursing to raise her family (yes, father included) but ultimately went back to her career, taking a job as an elementary school nurse following my father’s premature death from cancer. (She always said that the wounds were worse during the war, but the nursing was the same. People are people.)
But I have a self-imposed limit of 500 words so I had better get to it. I am deeply ashamed that I didn’t appreciate my mother more during her lifetime. She was and is, to this day, the kindest person I have ever met. She lived to serve others, no matter who they were, and she did it without ever asking for anything in return. She would have been very out of place in the ‘likes’ digital culture we live in today, where the expectation of reciprocity drives behavior.
I often thought of her as a little old-fashioned; a little out of place. And it was, I must admit, a pejorative judgment at times. If only, I thought, she could see the world the way my generation did.
But she could, of course. She just chose not to. Not for me or for anyone else. She knew who she was and what she believed and that, in the end, is the essence of courage.
I miss you, Mom.
(And, yes, I violated my self-imposed 500-word maxim. My mother deserves it.)
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A simple, practical guide to getting the most out of life without the orthodoxy of organized religion or the impersonization of political correctness and the “you must” movements.
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Understanding 