Hawk Mountain near my home town in PA

I’m in sort of a reflective mood this weekend.   My mom’ s birthday is coming up on Tuesday the 19th and that always makes me take stock of where I am in life.  She would have been 73 this year but she passed away in April 2009 after battling colon cancer for a couple of years.

My mom worked hard her entire life – factory work or unskilled labor.  She was looking forward to retirement to finally get to do the things she wanted to do and to just relax.  She was diagnosed with end stage colon cancer about a year into retirement.

After mom passed away, my brother and I were clearing out my dad’s house – our childhood home.  Dad got the house after the divorce and everything, I do mean everything, was exactly as it was at the time mom left.  We knew there was “old stuff” in the attic that we would have to go through and it was like a treasure hunt.  We found four crates of stuff – one for each of us.

In my mom’s crate we found a few stacks of correspondence that she had saved from her teen years in the early 1950’s.  From what we can tell, it was all the rage to have pen pals and she had several, mostly teenage girls in New York though we also found some other letters from men in the service.  I bundled up the letters and then read them after I returned home.  It was like finding out a whole new side of someone you THOUGHT you knew.

It became obvious that teenage girls in the 1950’s were groomed to find a man and marry upon graduation from high school.  It was also obvious that my mom – the youngest of eight – wanted, sometimes desperately, to get out of the house.  She had a wild streak we never knew about and some of the letters inferred she was living with my dad before they got married.  Not such a big deal now, but in 1958 it was probably frowned upon.

After my parents divorced in the late 1980’s, mom moved out and lived on her own for a while.  It was like a whole new world for her since she had always either lived at home or with my dad.   I didn’t realize then how much courage that took.  She eventually remarried and was outwardly happy for a while.  Things started to sour about 15 years into her second marriage.

Shortly before her death, she told me I was “smart” for never getting married.  She also said she would have left her second husband if she had been healthy.

Reading all the letters helped me put some pieces together.  My mom encouraged me to leave home and go to school somewhere else besides the college in our small town.  My dad was against the idea, but now I think my mom knew what it was like to want to want to break free.  She was proud of my independence.

I was profoundly sad that she lived most of her life doing what she felt she was “supposed” to do.  Or what other people expected of her.  Or what she had to do.  She never got to do most of the things on her bucket list.  I’m not even sure how happy she was for most of her first marriage.  It was like she had this whole life she just put up on a shelf, never to retrieve it again.

So I suppose her death was a lesson to my brother and I.  Don’t wait for retirement, reach for your dreams while you can.  Life is short and things can change in the blink of an eye.  We have bucket lists now and have checked off several things we always wanted to do.

But I still wonder if I’m pushing hard enough to get it all done.  I wonder if she would be proud or disappointed in some of the decisions I’ve made.  I wonder how her life would have changed if she had followed her dreams.

Happy Birthday Mom….I’m still working on the Best Life thing.  Thank you for giving me the gift of independence.  Oh, and thank you for teaching me how to bake.  😉

My mom & I in 1977