Proud, just like my mother planned it.

Happy Mother's Day! I didn't see my mom today, but I did send her flowers. Yay for the internet for making that easy. Anyway, next weekend is my mom's birthday, as well as the long weekend, so it makes more sense to travel home then.

I don't really talk about my mom as much as I do my dad, I think. Even though a lot of my friends have never met my parents, a lot of them know a lot about my dad because he's easy to tell stories about 'cuz he's a wild and crazy dude who prank calls me, reads obsessively, gardens obsessively, and acts a lot like Homer Simpson. (I could totally see him parking across three disabled spots.)

So as I was saying, because my dad's on the eccentric side, I tend to talk more about him than I do my mom. But since it is Mother's Day I'll blog about my mom.

So some background on my mom. My mom was born in Poland during World War II. During the war, her parents eventually became forced labourers on a farm in Germany. My grandparents hated talking about the war, so the family stories from these times are not overly detailed, and my grandparents are dead, so we only have what they shared. My mom told me a story about how my grandmother had three children when they were fleeing from the Germans. It was hard to run with three children in tow, and someone told my grandma to set down the baby (my mom) and come back for her later. If she survived, that is. My grandma did, but couldn't bear to leave a crying baby, and returned for her. That story amazes me, because if it happened differently, well, I wouldn't be here.

After the war, my grandparents settled in Northern Ontario, and my mother was the hardworking, bookish middle-child of the family. She became a teacher back in the day where you didn't need a university degree to get a teaching degree, but she got her BA in English at the same time she was teaching. The thought of taking university courses while teaching just made me say "holy hell" out loud. That would be so hard.

My mom taught elementary school. She started with the younger grades but somehow ended up teaching grade 8 for most of her career. I'm pretty sure it's a universally-accepted fact that grade 8 is the hardest grade to teach. I guess that's another testament to my mother's strength.

My mother's teaching career ended when I was born. The intention was that she would stay at home with me until I was ready for school, then she would return to teaching. That never happened because my mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis the year before I was born. By the time I went to school, she knew that she wouldn't be able to return to work.

My mother's MS gets progressively worse each year. She could sometimes walk with me to school (five minutes down the street) when I was in Kindergarten, but that was pretty much the only year she could do that. She could still drive when I was in high school, but she gave that up. In 2006, the year my dad had surgery, she had a pretty bad MS attack as a result of the stress of my dad being sick. She was in the hospital for quite some time, and the doctors told her that she'd might not be able to go back home, but she would not have any of that talk. She worked very hard in physiotherapy, and is now probably in better shape than she was before the attack, and made it back home despite the initial grim prognosis.

So yeah, basically my mom is an amazing person with so much strength and optimism in the face of adversity. I know that I don't tell her this enough. I think I use my mom too much as a sounding board when I'm displeased with the way things are happening in my life, and really, I clearly have nothing to complain about. Probably, the worst thing in my life has been my mom's disease, but it couldn't compare to actually having it. I am always sad about opportunities that I'll never have with my mother. I know that if she was well, we'd probably leave my dad at home, and go on trips during the summer, she'd come visit me in the city and we'd go shopping, and she'd point out that my apartment is a mess and that I really should hem my curtains and fix my dining room chairs.

However, I'll never have that, but I have been blessed with an amazingly strong mother who loves me more than anything, and is crazy-proud of me, which is far important that any of that stuff above.

Oh, here's a random picture of me and the kid who was clearly my boyfriend at the time (since he's carrying my dolls) that I have scanned on my computer. My mom took it. Pictures of her are few and far between because she was always the one taking the pictures. I think that's like everyone's mom, right? Moms of the present day will be more well-preserved because of digital cameras and self-timers.