Mamma Mia!

We human beings come into existence in this world through no choice of our own. When we are born many things have already been decided on our behalf: our birth date, our birth place, and our birth parents.

Our parentage is one of the choices we never make at the commencement of our lives. If we could have made that decision prior to birth, I think many of us would have chosen quite differently since not everyone has been born to loving and responsible parents.

Growing up, a lot of us really don't get to see the value of our fathers and mothers because, at the time of our youth, we viewed them from the lens of immaturity, impatience, and ignorance.

As an adult, I have come to realize how infinitely blessed I have been to have the parents that I got. I expressed this gratitude for having been influenced by my father in an article I wrote over three months ago.

Today, in honor of my mother's birthday, I decided to express how grateful I am for her and how she brought me up, educated me, and supported me throughout my entire life.

Thinking about my mother in the months leading up to writing this blog entry, my thoughts circled around three of her more prominent character qualities that I have noticed and have come to appreciate over the years.


RESOLUTE

As a teenager, I have often heard my mother tell stories of her life and the hardships she's had to go through raising most of her siblings after the death of her own mother when she was in her early teens. The choices she made to fill the role of a surrogate mother to her younger brothers and sisters, to still pursue her studies in spite of financial difficulty (she comes from a huge family of eight siblings), and to maintain excellence in whatever she found her hands to do have spoken to me of the resoluteness her character.

I saw this firsthand growing up in how determined she was to pursue and maintain a career in the armed forces during a time when women weren't as welcomed in this field as they are now. In her line of work -- as a chemist in the police crime laboratory -- I also inferred her purposefulness in the way she stuck to her job in the face of potential occupational hazards. She was formidable that way.

In a more personal way, I felt her determination applied on me and my brother in her efforts to make sure that we did well in school and that we grew up to become upstanding citizens of the world. Looking at how my brother and I turned out, I'd say my mother's resoluteness paid off and rubbed off on us.


RESOURCEFUL

For a good fifteen years of our lives as a foursome, my parents, my brother, and I pretty much lived a semi-comfortable, moderately well-funded lifestyle. Intermittently, my mother found creative ways to augment the family's income stream by coming up with different small business ventures. These forays into entrepreneurship showed me just how resourceful she was and how that character trait of hers was such a blessing to our little cluster.

Her resourcefulness was especially brought to the fore when our economic status was severely challenged by a change in the family's income. During this season of financial struggle, my mother's combined resoluteness and her ability to deal well with difficult situations aided us as we walked through the dark valleys of material and monetary deficiency. She found solutions that helped keep us afloat amidst problems that would have otherwise sunk us all. She was innovative that way.


RESILIENT

My mother has never been a stranger to hardships and struggles as her life has been shaped and marked by them. These, however, have made every moment of breakthrough and victory sweeter to enjoy. This reality was made more noticeable when cancer came and hit her hard.

As if losing her husband to cancer wasn't afflictive enough, she had to hear her diagnosis (stage 2B, breast cancer) three weeks after the fact. How does one deal with two life tragedies happening in quick succession?

During this season of battling the dreaded disease, I saw my mother's resilience at every turn, though it may not have seemed so from her vantage point at the time. From her own lips, however, she testified how the weakness she felt from the cancer and from the cure paved a way for her to find strength in God, and maturity in her spiritual being.

A little over half a year later, she came out the other end with a renewed vigor for life, a reinforced verve for the divine, and  an even stronger resolve to face whatever obstacle would come her way moving forward.

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There are more admirable qualities that my mother holds deep inside her. These are just some of the ones that readily came to mind as of this writing.

Over the years, as I have reached my thirties and walked into my forties, my mother has become more than just a parent; she and I have actually become really good friends; she's also become my confidant -- someone I can openly talk to and share details of my life with.

I am blessed to have arrived at this level of relationship with her.