In honor of the world’s toughest job (birthing/raising/babying adult kids) tomorrow.
What special thing(s) did your mom do for you?
My mom is an art history major who specialized in making tapestries, a big part of Korean Folk Art. So her skills translated into making clothes and she was the closest thing to a seamstress I have ever known.
She made a lot of clothes for the family and quite nice ones too. Now she stopped as the arthritis in her hands has made things tough for her.
Thanks mom!
And to all the moms on DS, Happy Mother’s Day!
Happy Mother’s Day to all! I bet all the commenting mothers here are exemplary. Everything you’d want in a mother. Smart, funny, patient, a good sense of perspective. My mother was like this, although she moved me along a little rapidly above my maturity range, especially in the reading materials she left strewn around the house for me to pick up at random, and she sometimes forgot that she was speaking to me as a child and not one of the kids a decade older. But for that I was grateful, especially in retrospect. My teachers not so much.
I’ve told you about my infamous heart-to-heart with my sixth-grade teacher, she was a saint, and my lit-crit of the…I don’t know what it was supposed to be, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, that the teacher had assigned, and I stayed after class and questioned whether it was a real book and confessed that my mother and I were, at the time, clawing our way through The Brothers Karamazov. That required a little in-person visit from my parents, who stood up for me. I mean why not? There was no Internet. Dostoevsky is a difficult writer but he’s not controversial. Inappropriate, maybe, for a 12-year-old, but with “guided reading” we got through it. (This was a college edition my mother found at a yard sale or something. It was the Golden Age of the quality paperbacks with lots of notes and explanatory pieces. I wish I still had it.)
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that my parents were in the habit of bullying teachers like they are nowadays. And certainly not the School Board, and I’m sure we had one. I fully deserved every low grade I ever received during high school math and science classes, and my parents never protested. My engineer father never understood why I never figured out basic concepts. On the other hand he appreciated that I seemed to take an interest in the wider world, and while he was alive I persuaded him to ship me off to a foreign country to learn more (home stay, for an entire summer). Then, after my father was dead and my mother eventually came around and allowed me to leave my high-prestige university and ship off to the Bundesrepublik…the rest, as they say, is history.
And this is not to mention my mother’s enthusiastic approval of my Black male Life’s Helpmeet. #blessed
I’m going to see my mom in 3 days for first time in a year. We were really close when I was little as all my siblings were much older. She taught me how to cook & spoiled me. I traveled a bunch with her when my dad had to go off on military missions. We butted heads a bunch when I was a teen & as an adult she didn’t like most of my girlfriend choices but I always loved & respected her. She always loved my wife though which was a good sign. Now, she is almost 97 & still sharp mentally most of the time even though her body is giving out. Makes these trips that much more special.
My mom helped teach me to drive, which is something I’m reminded of because my wife reported our new car got dinged while our daughter was driving (not her fault).
My mother taught me to drive, too.
In the family tradition, you learn to drive in a cemetary. Slow gentle turns, no one around is alive to worry about hitting.
I didn’t have the best relationship with my mother. But parenting is difficult and I like to think she did her best. She and my father both loved to read and instilled that in all of their children. I thank her for that.
My mom has always been much more caring and nurturing, and open and sociable, than my dad. And for better or worse, that duality is one of things I carry inside myself now.
my mum was in the first batch of nurse practitioners in the netherlands
anyways…you know how tv always plays nurses off as caring sweethearts?
yeaaah…its all lies
ive got doctor house with an added dose of sarcasm and a side of that doctor from scrubs….
she’s never not been there for me tho….and a few hours from now a ridiculously large bouquet of flowers should be arriving at her doorstep
i love her dearly….but lets just say you need thick skin around her
My wife is a nurse practitioner & sounds just like your mom. Am I your dad?
dont think so…….buried him many years ago
funny thing… dude suspected he was diabetic for many years……but the blood work never showed anything out of the ordinary no matter how often he got tested
we lived out in the sticks back then…and he would always ride his bike to the docs 10 km away
turns out a bike ride like does that does fucking wonders for leveling off your sugar levels…..we only figured that shit out after he fell into a sugar coma
anyways….he survived that one….but…untreated diabetes will fuck you up…gave him polyneuropathy… dude had to take approximately all the fucking painkillers in the world to get through the day…and eventually that killed him
he was 57
If LoveShaq turned out to be your dad I think I would go to Lemmy and Ellieco and demand a DNA test to make sure they weren’t my real parents and I was adopted all this time.
lol….in memoriam of jerry springer
I’ve never had an encounter with a nurse practitioner where I thought wow they’re so kind and loving.
I’ve always had good experiences, but they’re definitely brusque and to the fucking point.
My mom is currently in Europe with a man I only just found out about before she left last week… They’ve been “companions” for the past seven months apparently. Which tracks because I haven’t heard much from her in that time (she usually calls to complain about everyone and everything). And here I thought my boundaries were finally being respected. Nope she’s just in the throws of new love. She is a complicated person and did the best she could as a single mom with a small business to run.
I feel torn between reactions of yougo mom and dammit mom!
Right?! I’m vacillating between “good for her!” and “oh I hope he’s not swindling her out of money.”
Welp my dad managed to do that in the divorce and she has been bitter (to put it nicely) about it for the past three decades so I’m not too worried about this guy swindling her. But you never know, she did get catfished for a whole year in an online relationship. The guy even had phone calls with her and had her talk to his “sister”. She only realized he was a scam when he asked her for money. That is an automatic trigger for her thanks to my dad. I guess something good did come out of their divorce.