Feminism

Women Who Inspire Me #7: My mom

Posted on April 25, 2018

When I first started this series late last year (2017), I did warn you that my mom would be on this list, in its full but stereotypical glory. However, I wanted to get a few other women in the series first so that I wasn’t kicking it off on an absolute cliche.

However, my mom’s birthday is soon and I wanted to secretly honor that by saving her on this list until then.

So without further ado: Women Who Inspire Me #7 is: my mom

My Mom

My mom is one of the most hard-working people I’ve ever met. And everyone says that about their own mother, but in this case, it’s true, I’m right and I’m willing to fight you over it. She was a single-parent and she always worked two jobs to make sure that my brother and I had everything we needed in life (by the way, state of New Mexico, please reflect on how badly you paid teachers in the 90s that my mom worked two jobs to support her family). She is a school teacher who has dedicated her life to improving the state education system in rural New Mexico, and since she’s always primarily taught 6-7 year olds she’s taught hundreds of children to read in her long and wonderful career. I don’t know how she has the patience for it.

When I was about 7, she also went back to school to get her Master’s Degree whilst continuing to work full-time and raise two kids on her own. If that’s not juggling, I don’t know what else is. My best childhood memories aren’t Christmas or my birthday, but times when she’d spend the evening reading aloud to my brother and I. We went through all of the Narnia series, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydian, all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. At times I’d have to prod her and my brother both awake as they would have nodded off during the reading and I needed more book.

For obvious privacy reasons, I never talk about how my mom fosters very vulnerable children in the foster care system so not only has she been a rock in my brother and my personal lives but in dozens of other children’s as well. The patience and love that she’s shown to us at home has been shown to many other children. Emotionally, she’s the strongest person I know and she has an iron-will and stubbornness that knows no equal. My brother and I definitely know that she’d kill for us.

And sometimes she’d do all of this whilst having cancer. And sometimes she’d do all of this plastering her own house, or laying her own lawn. Whenever Sam and I have come across a house issue, she’s the first person I text as she’s usually done it herself in her own home, pre the era of watching youtube videos like “how to plaster over a ceiling crack yourself” (a video I may or may not have watched recently…)

She’s extremely generous and from her I learned the value of hard-work, the benefits of keeping your cool in arguments (though I might not be very good at that one), perseverance, and she was the ultimate model of anything a man can do, a woman can do. (I think back to watching her lift bags of cement when she was lining a path in our backyard when we were kids and I marvelled at how someone so small could be so strong). And though I’m sure that I do something daily that she doesn’t agree with, she loves me anyway. However, I am slightly concerned that she loves Sam more as recently she sent us a parcel from America with a bunch of Girl Scout cookies in it and included mostly Sam favourites.

My mom hates pictures of herself but she’s beautiful so I’m going to share one here. Also, everyone says we look so similar so I’m giving myself a subtle compliment too.