I Resented My Mom

This essay was originally published July 11, 2018.

I resented my mom. I was the oldest of four kids and in those days dads worked and moms stayed at home and took care of the household. Well, my mom was one of the few who worked for a living. She and her brother were the first in her family to get college degrees, and they both got master’s degrees. She'd grown up dirt poor, started at the telephone company at the age of 16, and worked her way through college.

Both she and my dad would be away at work every day and a good deal of the responsibility for taking care of my brothers and sisters fell on my shoulders. Everyone else’s mother was home after school with cookies and everything else and we came home to a babysitter or, as we got older, to just us. My dad was a student and then a professor so his nights were long and he was on the road a lot.

Not only that, but my mom came home from work exhausted every day. I mean, she would come home, drop her things, and that was that. She wasn’t much fun, or entertaining, or any of those things, at least as I remember it now.

So I resented my mom. I envied the other kids who went home and had their mothers waiting for them. And I carried much of that into high school.

Then one day, for some reason, mom asked me to bring her something at work. I’d never been to her place of work. We lived in Olathe, Kansas a little town of 20,000 at the time, and she drove into Kansas City every day. I think I was home from college at that point.

And I got to see what my mom – the uncaring, cold, tired mom – did every day. She was a special education teacher and had 15 orthopedically handicapped kids in a class that today, before the passage of Public Law 92-142, she told me later would not be allowed to be over 8 kids. They loved her. She did, what she called, ‘heavy lifting.’ Literally. Took them to the bathroom, cleaned them up, moved them around. With little, and sometimes, no help. In those days teachers pretty much provided music for the kids and that was it. Mom was part of a new breed, who taught those kids to read and to learn to their capacities. Even though both my parents were special educators, I don't know much about special education. But I do know this. She loved those students.

My whole opinion of my mother changed that day. I realized just how much she cared, not only about her kids, but also about us as her own kids. Over time my respect and love for the sacrifices she made to survive the depression, get my dad through school, what it meant for her to get an education, and then to see that we got one too - and then everything she did for us in her very own quiet way until the day she died, has grown and grown. And keeps growing even now.

Self-effacing, seldom talking about herself, serving others and her family. Humble.

What is caring?

Is there someone who is quiet, tired, grouchy, tough - you get the idea - in your life who loves you more than anything? Someone you take for granted? Or whose love for you and others is just going over your head, or you're blind to it? Who is that person? When is the last time you told them how much you cared and loved them?

Sometimes we can’t see someone who cares about us more than anything, right in front of our eyes.

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