Because I said so...

The best advice my mother ever gave me?  WOW.  Where do I start?  If you don’t know my mom, that’s sad, I wish you did.  Was she the perfect mother?  Hardly.  In fact, she is quite flawed.  And she has certainly not lived a perfect life.  But, she is my mom, quite possibly my truest best friend, and one helluva woman.  I don’t know anyone who has a bigger heart and a bigger capacity for compassion.  I am positive that she passed that on to me. 

I don’t know if the things my mom have told me could be considered advice or suggestions.  Because it always seems like she said “I suggest” versus, “my advice to you would be.”  I suppose the biggest, most important one was, as the song says, “Momma always said there’d be days like this.”  Most often used when I was having a shitty day. 

And probably the next thing and perhaps as equally as important as knowing there would be shitty days, was her insistence that if we wanted to judge people, we could certainly “walk a mile in their moccasins.”  I don’t remember her being in our face about it, just quite confident that our lives weren’t so bad and if we thought they were, we could certainly go try someone else’s.  It is a tough lesson to teach a child or anyone really…that other people struggle too.  That life is less than perfect for pretty much all of us.  That our discipline was nothing compared to how it could be or what other kids had to endure.  That life can always be so much worse than we think.

It was/is no secret that we were thought of as spoiled rotten rich kids.  If people only knew.  I am not saying we didn’t have things.  I am not saying we didn’t get spoiled.  I am saying that all of us had jobs before we could drive on our own.  All of us had responsibilities in the home that no one else got to see.  There is a picture of the 3 of us doing dishes when we were all standing on chairs because we were too little to reach the sink.  We didn’t get handed things.  Contrary to popular belief.  And I am positive we didn’t because if we thought we needed something we were reminded that others didn’t have those things and if we wanted them so bad, we could earn them. 

Last and not least… “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”  She was quite adamant about giving props to Eleanor Roosevelt for saying it, but she wanted to make sure we knew that.  From that moment on, whenever someone would hurt me and a lot did and a lot still do, she would say this.  They hurt you because you let them.

I suppose the only advice that she personally gave me that I have never used is the advice about being a mother myself.  “I can’t wait until you are a mom, then you will have answers to so many of your questions about why I said because I said so.”