Happy Birthday, Mom

So, I didn’t keep up with the “Things My Mother Tried to Teach Me” posts. Which is perhaps ironically appropriate, as I’ve not been a terribly good student of my mother’s lessons all these years.

Bits of Mom’s wisdom I wanted to cover but didn’t get to:
-The difference between private inspiration and public revelation (and how confusion between the two can cause difficulties in Christian circles).
-The multiplicity of solutions to any given problem (granted, I still usually wish there was just one clear answer, and someone else to take over for me).
-Love of music. I usually give my Dad credit for this, but it was my mother who gave me my first piano lessons and who harassed me to practice.
-A sense of the value of being a SAHM. And about frugality and butter. (This really should become a post someday).
-That being family and keeping family takes an investment of time, effort, and intention.
-Love of learning, computers, encyclopedias and other research tools.
-People are more important than things.
-Don’t drag a dead cow out of the ditch. (This means essentially the same thing as “Don’t beat a dead horse.” It used to come up whenever a disagreement was endlessly rehashed).
-Hospitality.
-Faith. We were never a family that was going to have daily family devotionals, which didn’t stop Mom from trying. Years of stalled attempts to get us all to say the rosary or the Divine Office together every day taught me a very valuable lesson – that faith is worth it, worth trying for, something for even us imperfect people who can’t get our acts together.

There’s more, I know. But it’s late and I could never list it all in one blog post anyway. It’s not as though any of us can really capture the myriad subtle effects our parents have on who we are.

I was born the year Mom turned 30. Now my own 30th birthday approaches and I have a sense of how *unfinished* a 30 year old is – indeed, how unfinished we all are. I find it easier to forgive my parents the perceived shortcomings which I once (as a teen and young adult) judged much more harshly. I hope that my own children will someday forgive me mine. I am more impressed, year by year, by the things my parents have accomplished and the virtues they possess. And I find that even when I thought they had nothing to teach me, they were planting the seeds of many lessons that are only now beginning to bear fruit.

So here’s to you, Mom. You put up with me during my insufferable years and love me anyway. You raised 7 children to adulthood and instilled in us so so many things – none more precious than the Faith. You raised us – and then you set us out in to the world with a grace I am learning is rare and valuable.

This is my gift to you. This propensity for putting words together to find meaning, which I inherited from you, so that even this gift is something I had first from you. I hope your birthday is a happy one and that every year to come holds even more joy than the ones that have passed.

with love,
Kate