A Word About My Mother

[The following is a small excerpt from a writing project I did about the women in my family who have made me what I am. I figure this is an appropriate Mother's Day share]. 

My mother says her soul was largely furnished by her mother. We’d tease Mom for always saying things like “oh, just look at these trees, have you ever seen anything so green?” or “can you believe how gorgeous that sunset is?” She’s filled to the brim with gladness for the simple things. When we give her a hard time for it, she always just says, “I got it from my mother.”

Something else that her mother taught her was that she could do anything that she put her mind to. And the reason her mother knew that? Because her father told her that she could do anything. He literally stopped the wagon they were traveling in and made sure she knew that she was capable and that she could do or be anything that she wanted.

For the early part of her life, my mother interpreted that to mean joining every club, being the president of every organization, getting straight As in all her years of schooling (except one B+ in 8^th grade health class under the mysterious subcategory of ‘citizenship’).

This mentality took her through a series of competitions all the way to the National College Queen pageant held in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1969 during her sophomore year of college. The look of shock on her face (as pictured in the newspaper) when a girl who considered herself a little too tall and a little too smart first got named the Homecoming Queen of the University of Utah, must have carried over as she was later named Miss Utah College Queen. The next step was flying eastward to Florida and even to Washington, D.C. for a day to meet “Mrs. Richard Nixon.”

I know what you’re picturing now, my mother the beauty queen. She is gorgeous, but she is also grounded and intelligent and insightful and one of the least superficial women I’ve ever known.

The winner of the National Pageant would get a car, an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe, and a college scholarship. The first runner-up would get three typewriters. Guess which prize my Mom took home?

The typewriters were a poetic award actually, in light of the way she’s spent her life since then. In raising her children, my mother had great desires that we would each (or at least a few of us) develop musical prowess that she wished she had developed in herself. She took us to years of piano lessons trying to make us what she wasn’t, and instead we each became what she was---a writer.

When I sat in my apartment in New York City in the fall of 2014, I couldn’t help thinking of her in the early years of her marriage living in Chicago; a girl from Midvale, Utah tackling the big city. She graduated from Harvard with a Master’s in English Education and taught one year of high school before deciding that it was not for her. She felt constrained by bells that rang and things she had to do.

She wanted to be a writer. She felt like a child posing as an adult too by just boldly saying, “I am a writer, this is what I do for a living,” but she was determined. She started making calls and knocking doors. Lots of big companies were based in Chicago then, Encyclopedia Britannica, McGraw Hill, not to mention all the newspapers. But she was an unknown, and to add to that challenge, she wasn’t in a position to accept a full-time job. She was already expecting a baby. So, she was in the market for freelance work and had no idea where to find it.

It found her.

After months of looking, she was in the hallway of her Mormon church building one day, cleaning up after an event, when the public phone on the wall started ringing. She picked it up and it was none other than the Chicago Sun Times looking to do an article on Mormon women. Without hesitation, she said, “I’m a writer. I’ll do that article.”

I can’t imagine the gumption it took to live the life she did in Chicago and since then. She said that when each of her babies turned two, she’d just want another one. And she continued to write. She’d write with a newborn in her lap, then a toddler. She says, “I got great rhythm in my writing because I was always bouncing someone on my knee.”

It was an unpopular path to take. This was the mid-1970s when women in America were taking great pride in striking out into the work force, and she felt their stares as she would come into the newspaper offices with a toddler in tow to pick up her next assignment.

Their eyes said having a baby meant she had sold out. Having two babies nineteen months apart? She must be stupid.

I’m glad she didn’t heed their judgments. And that she kept having babies because it would take quite a few more before she got to me. I’m number ten.

It’s only been since leaving home that I’ve developed any anxieties about how having children ends your life or ends your career. And it’s only now that I’m seeing why it had previously never seemed like an issue to me. I was raised by a mother who refused to let her life end, because she was raised by a mother who refused to let her life end. Within three months of the loss of her beloved husband, my Nana put in to run for the school board and was elected president. She served on that board (and a few others) for 20 years.

My mother didn’t let having babies slow her down because she was investing in a lifelong pursuit, both with us and with her writing. She wasn’t expecting immediate acclaim and assuming that if she didn’t find it, she should probably just quit. She knew she was talented, she knew she had more to learn, and she’s spent her whole life continuing to learn it whenever and however she could. 

She made me believe that I can do that. I don't know if I will become a New York Times Bestselling author by 30, but I can write. And find time between times and set aside time, and keep writing.

[It's a glimpse more than a proper tribute, but I sure love my best friend/mother. I put together an article for Meridian about mother-related videos and the one below was by far my favorite. It got me all teary and though I'm no Olympian, my mother has certainly been one of the major reasons for any success I've found in life so far]