“Hello?”
“It’s your mother.”
“Mom, why are you phoning my office?”
“Because you won’t answer your door.”
“I’m not answering my door because I told you when it’s locked, it means I’m busy.”
“I just need one minute of your time.”
“Mom, I have a lot to do.”
“I’m your mother.”
“What do you need?”
“Can you help me with this algebra problem?”
“No.”
“It’s just one problem.”
“Ask Dad. He’s good at math.”
“I already asked him. He said to ask you.”
“I have a stack of books in front of me. I have another 400 pages of reading to do tonight.”
“I know, but it’s just one problem.”
“Sorry, Charlie, you have figure it out yourself.”
“You’re not nice.”
“I think you should bake some cookies for your teacher.”
“I tried that. He’s not too friendly. He doesn’t care about the cookies.”
“Make him a lasagna.”
“I tried that too.”
“Looks like you have a real problem.”
It was 1990, the fall of my first semester of law school. In the previous year, I made a deal with my mother that if I got accepted into law school, she would have to go back to high school. My mother loved learning, but when she met my father, she knew she would need money to get married, so she dropped out of high school. She still needed two years of schooling to graduate. I knew this could take longer than two years, but I also knew this was important to her. She loved learning. Every so often, over the previous years, she would lament not having finished high school. I knew she wanted to do it and all she needed was a nudge to take the first step.
Of course, there were some friends and family who wondered why she would go through so much trouble at her age and with all her health issues.
Some people looked at her and only saw illness. They focused on her medical history and worried how long she would live. In their eyes, the problem grew as time passed. But my mother chose a different perspective. She tended to shrink obstacles. For her, the health issues were just things that were annoying, not much different than flies and mosquitos in the kitchen. So, with this mindset, she held true to her word. Twenty-five years after she dropped out of high school, she took on the challenge, enrolled in the Adult Learning Center, and quickly began her first semester with three courses.
Click Follow to receive emails when this author adds content on Bublish
Comment on this Bubble
Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.