The Lesson of My Mom

One lesson is better than all the rest

Photo by Satit Wongsampan on Unsplash

Growth of any kind at any age is to be celebrated. This is what my mom taught me in the story I share below.

P.S. You’re never too old.

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When my Mom turned 90, she ran a victory lap at achieving that ripe number (well, not exactly run or even walk, but celebrated a spiritual lap).

She told her six children that she had lived a blessed life, considered herself one of the luckiest women on the planet, and was now ready for the Good Lord to take her. We, on the other hand, were experiencing what my economics teacher once referred to as the “Pig Principle,” which goes:

If goods (or, in this case, Moms) are good, we only want more.

We convinced my Mom she had more in her tank and helped her forge ahead for another year of living.

Now, Rosyne did not have an easy start. My grandfather had a gambling addiction that caused my grandparents to divorce in an era where divorces seldom occurred.

My grandmother struggled to cope with her own harsh realities: divorced, poor, and overwhelmed by raising four daughters. My mother was the oldest and alternated between playing part sister and part mother.

The youngest sister, who so depended on my mother, died in her early twenties of asthma. Another sister eloped and began her own tumultuous chapter. Her third sister chose her spouse unwisely and was seldom happy.

And there was my mother, the family’s rock of Gibraltar. She recalls that because she was lonely and dateless, she played piano six hours a day until she met my dad. Even in that dark start, as she nursed her family along, my mother exhibited what we have come to depend on most — her unbridled optimism.

My brother would call her ability to always see life on the sunny side “The Rosie Lens.”

At 17, my mother married and moved into her mother’s house because my parents had no resources and no obvious future. Weighted by his own parents’ needs, my father had turned down an offer to attend a yeshiva to become a Rabbi. He was a gifted man who instead settled into running a small kosher grocery store in his hometown of Denver.

The economics meant he needed my mother to abandon being a stay-at-home mom and help him run Utica Grocery. She would share with us that she cried for one week and then never looked back.

It turns out that my parents’ strengths were quite complementary. My father excelled at numbers and was an excellent listener who became both a grocer and a psychologist to his customers. My mother was the entrepreneur ushering in new product lines and sometimes “overselling” to customers. This explains my visual memory of my father standing in the back of the store, pantomiming to soften my mom’s pitch.

It was fortunate that we never came close to eating all the food my mother told our customers we loved.

Business was hard, though, and they had six kids to raise and send to college. My dad was the pragmatist, and my mom was the tireless cheerleader. She would do school pickups, drive us to various appointments, rush back to the store, and eventually get home in the nick of time to make dinner, which took her all of 15 minutes.

Late at night, my mom would finally settle into tranquility with a cup of tea and a newspaper. This is when I would sometimes sneak out of bed and keep her company.

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My mom would need all that strength and more as she was widowed at the tender age of 57. After mourning the loss and continuing to run the grocery store, my mom knew it was time for a new path. The store required physical labor and was not sufficiently safe for a sole female proprietor. She decided to sell the store and transition to an office job.

My oldest sibling remembers dropping off my mother at vocational school to develop typing skills. The image still haunts her of my vulnerable mother ascending the school’s steps alongside sprite eighteen-year-olds.

What my mom felt, we will probably never really know. Outwardly, she showed strength, resilience, and determination. While she deeply missed my father, she never shirked spreading her wings as she began channeling his pragmatism into her life.

She grew into an office manager for my brother’s accounting office. Yes, she typed, answered phones, and ran to the bank, but mostly, she became the social glue that kept the office humming. She tried retiring many times, but my brother and his partners resisted until, at 87, she finally got her wish.

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The lessons to be taken from my Mother’s life could fill a book.

Marry for love.

Stay resilient.

Maintain an optimistic outlook because it is usually self-fulfilling.

Take life in stride or, said another way, when eggs break, make an omelet.

Children are different and require different parenting styles. For my rebellious brother, she learned to answer with silence while he figured things out. For me, long phone calls where she reiterated her faith in me were the answer.

That her parenting skills grew with us was important on many levels. In my mother’s early years, she was very strict. If my siblings didn’t hang up their clothes, a closet’s worth of clothes came off the hangers, leaving more to be re-hung. The same went for an unmade bed — sheets were thrown off. I suspect she was trying to instill discipline and order, believing those habits would help us achieve more in life.

By the time I came around (number five in the lineup), we had a different set of parents — mellow, wiser, and picking fewer battles. This often irritated my older siblings, as they would feel inclined to step in and fill the discipline gap. My parents would remind them I needed only one set of parents, and they were it.

The real gift in this metamorphosis was that I could look at my mom and see her evolution. I now had permission to figure things out.

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But of all the things I will take from my Mom, the deepest gift will be her love of learning.

Books, classes, and people were opportunities to expand her worldview. This was particularly apparent when, at 80, my mother decided to ramp up her Jewish studies and enrolled in a formal program. Her younger classmates must have appreciated her almost as much as her children because one day, they presented her with a rolling backpack to lug heavy books.

When she completed the program, she was proud that this was her first “real graduation.” My mom was not able to afford college, and I guess high school didn’t count. At the time, I shared her reflection with my siblings, and two of them promptly made arrangements to fly out and attend. My brother’s firm threw her a graduation party.

As I go forward, I will take with me that image of my Mother and her rolling backpack.

We are all unfinished people with opportunities to grow, learn, and embrace the world around us.

It is all about the lens, and if we are lucky, “Rosie” might be inside us, too.

It has been seven years since my mother passed, and I still think about her daily. Now in my 60s, I hold onto the image of the rolling backpack and its symbol of continuous lifeline learning.

Like the green leaves breaking through the brick wall in the image above, I want to persist. Growth can happen anytime, anywhere, I remind myself.

I just hope my kids are watching. It’s a lesson that spans generations.