SHADOW DREAMS
Thomas Friedman has a heart-felt post about this first Mother's Day after the passing away of his 89-year old mom last month. The bit that resonated the most for me today was when he says:
"She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.
The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too."
Yes, they did and if around, still do.
Most of our lives we go through life seeing our moms through the prisms of our own wants, needs and ambitions. It starts when we're babies of course, since most moms seem programmed to be around at our beck and call at that age.
Even after we've grown much older and gone on to make lives of our own, our relationship with our mom is still heavily tinted by how our moms have treated us over the years. It takes an effort to consider sometimes how we've treated them over the years. And how they saw their lives both before and after our shadows.
I wrote a few years back about how my Mom was surprised by the very concept of Mother's Day, a very Western concept in her eyes. From her perspective, the very notion of envisioning her life without her two kids seemed very alien indeed. But she had dreams too, as Thomas Friedman puts it so well, and this Mother's Day, I'd like to talk to my mom about them.
Happy Mom's Day, all.
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