I don’t know if I’m ready to write this one.  A few columns back, when I was writing about lessons from my grandfather, I promised that I would also write a “lessons from my mother” column.  This one is hard because my mother is not doing great.  It’s been about a year and a half since she was diagnosed with dementia.  And she’s got a bunch of other chronic health problems, some bigger, some smaller.  It’s mostly stuff that’s coming for us all if we are so lucky to live as long as she has.  But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier.

The hardest thing, for me, is the dementia.  It’s hard to see somebody who was so sharp, so engaged – and now, she’s just not all the way there anymore.  It’s hard because this is the person who has had the single most impact on my life, and on who I am.  And yes, of course, I wouldn’t exist without her (she’s my mother, after all), but her influence/my debt to her runs deeper than biology or proximity.  She was a scrappy single mother with a lot of interesting takes on the world.  And I was an only child, so I was a special kind of captive audience.  

Here are some of her life lessons that have had a huge impact on me and that I think are relevant to the work that we do (making some assumptions about who would read a column like this):

“So little time, so many books.”  My mom has a sweatshirt with this slogan printed on it.  Also a T-shirt.  And a bookmark.  She reads pretty high-brow stuff – her favorite writers are James Baldwin (nonfiction) and Jane Austen (fiction) – and tons of genre stuff too (mysteries are her favorite).  I don’t think she finishes many books these days – the same book will stay on her nightstand for weeks and weeks, these days.  But, when I was growing up, it was like clockwork.  Every two weeks, we’d go to the library (the City of San Jose West Valley Branch), and each of us would check out a big stack of books.  Through these trips, through her words and her example, she trained me to be a book reader – which has meant a certain level of patience and mental discipline, cultivation of imagination, and increased comfort in being alone – all of which are invaluable life lessons.

You need to do “real” work.  For someone who was such a bookworm and so clearly engaged in the life of the mind, my mom could have some harsh judgments on people she thought existed exclusively in the academic/intellectual sphere.  It stems from when she was a PhD student, studying sociology, when she burnt out and took a terminal master’s.  She said it was because she got fed up with her smug professors and other grad students who had all these theories about what was wrong with the world but who never did anything “real” that directly helped people.  So, my mom dropped out of her PhD program and went to nursing school.  And then, through her stories and proselytizing, she hammered into me that, whatever it is I end up doing, I needed to see a direct causal link to how my work helps other people, that it helps make the world a better place.

And you need to work your ass off.  For most of her professional career, my mom was a nurse at Valley Medical Center, the main public hospital, here in San Jose.  Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would bring me to Valley Med to have one of the doctors check me to see if some random ailment or another was actually serious before going to my doctor or through her health plan – not exactly kosher, but an informal job perk for her.  One time, as a punky teenager during one of these ad hoc visits, I must have been giving off disrespectful, ungrateful, punk-teenager vibes because the doctor said something along the lines of, “You know, I don’t have to do this.  I’m only doing this because of your mother.  It’s a favor for her because of how much she does to hold this place together.  You should know that this place would fall apart without her.”   But I already knew how hard she worked.  I saw it in her long hours and in how exhausted she was all the time.  And I have always respected her for her commitment and for how hard she worked – even though the punk-teenager version of me couldn’t express it and even though another part of me concurrently felt the strain from and lack of presence of a single mother who was always busy, always tired.

Keep your radical beliefs on the down low.  My mother had a bunch of non-mainstream beliefs that she would rant to me about but never bring up in any other setting.  For example, my mother was a self-identified luddite – she does not own nor has she ever owned a television or an answering machine or a microwave*.  At points in her life, I’ve tried to drag her kicking and screaming into the internet age.  I bought her a computer and a cell phone and paid for her internet access and cell phone bills.  Even with the incentive of getting email pictures of her grandbabies when we lived in LA, these efforts all failed.  But, outside of the fact that she is hard to reach, most of her friends and family don’t know that she is hard to reach because she thinks that, in a capitalist world, all technological advances are fundamentally exploitative – that they exist to extract value from and to control people, especially women.  This line of argument is consistent with her self-proclaimed status as a radical, feminist socialist.  Self-proclaimed, stridently held, but not widely broadcast.  Her reticence on her radical beliefs probably had something to do with that, as a woman of color from a specific time/place/social context, she didn’t feel the psychological safety to show up as her full self (using today’s terminology, not words that she’d use).  And, also, something to do with a generalized desire not to make waves and something to do with the next (and most important) lesson…

Kindness is the most important thing.  For my mother, being kind is more important than being confrontational, more important than people knowing her radical beliefs.  I think that most people close to her would say her kindness and generosity were defining things about her.  She was always genuinely interested in other people and generous with her time and money (neither of which she had tons of).  For her family, for her friends, for her patients, for her co-workers, for her various communities, and for the causes and institutions she supported.  

Understanding kindness as a baseline/definitional aspect of all of the other lessons is something that I’ve been coming to later in life and has been making me better able to sustainably enact/embody the lessons.  When I was younger and less wise, enacting my interpretation of my mom’s lessons, I was more rigid and judgmental about what constituted “real” work.  I saw all kinds of stuff that wasn’t directly serving the people as selling out.  But, while my mother may have had words for me when I had interests or proposed career paths that she thought were frivolous or not adequately contributing to the greater good/the Revolution, I only need to think about how happy and proud she was of all her 15 nieces and nephews for their various careers and pursuits to understand that she wasn’t nearly as rigid or demanding of people close to her as she was of herself (or of me).  Similarly, when I was younger and less wise, I was more rigid and judgmental about how many hours a day or a week constituted an appropriate level of hard work.  I was somebody who worked himself to the bone and expected that others would follow suit.  Back in my mom’s heyday, “self-care” was not in common parlance, and outside of the joys of reading and an annual vacation, self-care was not something my mom did or advocated that people should do.  But maybe it would have helped her to understand (as I have come to understand) that self-care is also an act of kindness to others – that it makes one better able (more patient, more empathetic) to sustain the care that is due to everybody around them. 

I don’t know.  Another thing that is difficult about my mom’s current situation is that even now (especially now), care is something that is hard for my mother to accept.  As generous and as willing to lend a hand as she has been to others, she is quick to refuse any help.  And her refusals are not mere politeness.  She gets feisty and combative.  We argue like when I was a teen, except that now she’s playing the petulant, resistive punk and I’m the I-know-whats-best-for-you scold.  It’s a struggle to remember and honor her core self-identity as an independent and self-sufficient woman.  But I do the best I can.  We can only do our best.  This is another lesson that she is still teaching me.