I am so grateful for every member in our twisted little family (and don’t you worry, I will celebrate you all in due time), but today let me introduce my mother – the original secret badass.
It wasn’t until I become a mother myself that I truly got it. And as each passing stage of my kids’ lives float by, I find myself increasingly in awe.
I did well in school. Often I trotted home tests with scores of 98 or 99% and oft they were received with ‘and where did the other 1% go?’ Not in a pushy way, not in a punitive way, and not really ever in a way that made me feel anything but, ‘hmph, ya, where did that 1% go?’ Enter not settling. Enter not limiting what you can achieve.
I did well in sports for the most part. Most of them didn’t come naturally but I held my own most days because it was known that not going to practice or not trying was simply not an option. Not in a pushy way, not in a degrading way, just in a way that you knew – you were going. There was only ever one sport where I excelled and I did so quickly. She saw that. And then she proceeded to devote her weekends to it; she towed a bloody horse and trailer – by herself! – all over South Eastern Ontario most weekends of the summer. My God!!! I am seriously challenged even getting my children into a booster seat and getting them twenty minutes down the road to gym on time! And, my mother is like me (well, duh, vice-versa). I really love my down time – I like to exercise, soak in warm baths, sip long glasses of wine, and, decompress. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had three children in six different sports, one of which is horseback riding, but there is not a lot of decompression happening there. Never once do I ever recall hearing her utter a complaint or even insinuate one. Enter devotion. Enter calm confidence.
Refusing to settle, pushing past limits, utter devotion to family, and a calm power. My mother. She is a role model that any young woman would be lucky to have. And what is most astonishing is that she is so having had so little time with her own. We rarely discuss this (again the no complaining thing) but, mom, oh man does that add to the awe.
The Polaroids of her that flash through my memories are of a woman running down a cottage trail singing the Pointer Sisters, a completely unfazed woman up at 4am trotting off to another sporting event with the perfect (and by perfect I mean completely un-perfect) bagel sandwiches in tow, a woman in a PhD cap, a woman at midnight running down a finish line way too far in the distance, and ever the face that always drew all the tears out when I’d been just barely holding it together. There, of course, were other times too. Times of excruciating vulnerability. But she always rose; usually to much higher than where she had been before.
So today, on her birthday, let’s raise a glass (I suggest of a glorious full bodied wine) to my mother. She’s a badass. May someday I be one too. I’m so excited to try.