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LJ Idol Week Four
Apr. 7th, 2014 06:27 pm“Nobody can ride your back if your back's not bent." -- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Stand up straight. You're always so round-shouldered, just like your father," my mother told me over and over again. "Don't look at the ground when you walk. Look where you're going."
Invariably I would sigh, because I'd heard it all before. Or so I thought, in my full-on teenage-exaggeration mode.
My mother told me a lot of things during the late afternoons. Five days a week, she got out of work in the school cafeteria at the same time I got out of classes. After being on her feet all those hours, baking bread and dishing out food portions and cleaning huge pots, all she wanted to do was sit in her favorite corner of the dinette, between the window and the radio. She would smoke cigarettes and sip on her black coffee, and while the blue tobacco smoke streamed straight upward until it caught a current and disintegrated, we would talk and talk and talk.
Sometimes we would chat about childhood memories, mine and hers. I would confess, in great detail, the details of my tremblingly strong crushes on boys who had no idea I even existed. One day in seventh grade I came home shaking like a leaf because in the girls' restroom at school I had seen another girl with a hypodermic needle (to this day I have no idea if she was a druggie or a Type 1 diabetic). For a while a classmate named Diane, who ironically was born on the same day as I was, was calling me names and telling lies about me behind my back. And there was the afternoon when I came home blubbering about what a "meanie" my English teacher was.
So often my patient mother, who spent her teenage years in the Great Depression, had to explain to me how the world worked, how to talk to other kids, how to stand up for myself. Over and over again, she would repeat: "Remember, they're no better than you are. You're no better than them, but they're no better than you either." It was her homely way of reminding me that I had just as much inherent worth and dignity as every other human being.
Another thing she used to tell me: Life would be better once I was all grown up.
And time proved her right. I have had a much better life as an adult than as a teenager. I've done things I never could have dreamed of doing when I was young. The girl who thought no one liked her now has hundreds of friends. And I treasure those afternoons of life lessons from my mother.
"Stand up straight. You're always so round-shouldered, just like your father," my mother told me over and over again. "Don't look at the ground when you walk. Look where you're going."
Invariably I would sigh, because I'd heard it all before. Or so I thought, in my full-on teenage-exaggeration mode.
My mother told me a lot of things during the late afternoons. Five days a week, she got out of work in the school cafeteria at the same time I got out of classes. After being on her feet all those hours, baking bread and dishing out food portions and cleaning huge pots, all she wanted to do was sit in her favorite corner of the dinette, between the window and the radio. She would smoke cigarettes and sip on her black coffee, and while the blue tobacco smoke streamed straight upward until it caught a current and disintegrated, we would talk and talk and talk.
Sometimes we would chat about childhood memories, mine and hers. I would confess, in great detail, the details of my tremblingly strong crushes on boys who had no idea I even existed. One day in seventh grade I came home shaking like a leaf because in the girls' restroom at school I had seen another girl with a hypodermic needle (to this day I have no idea if she was a druggie or a Type 1 diabetic). For a while a classmate named Diane, who ironically was born on the same day as I was, was calling me names and telling lies about me behind my back. And there was the afternoon when I came home blubbering about what a "meanie" my English teacher was.
So often my patient mother, who spent her teenage years in the Great Depression, had to explain to me how the world worked, how to talk to other kids, how to stand up for myself. Over and over again, she would repeat: "Remember, they're no better than you are. You're no better than them, but they're no better than you either." It was her homely way of reminding me that I had just as much inherent worth and dignity as every other human being.
Another thing she used to tell me: Life would be better once I was all grown up.
And time proved her right. I have had a much better life as an adult than as a teenager. I've done things I never could have dreamed of doing when I was young. The girl who thought no one liked her now has hundreds of friends. And I treasure those afternoons of life lessons from my mother.
