Happy 35th! (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

It’s my mom’s birthday today and I wish I were there to celebrate it with her. She has been unfailingly positive about this overseas move, and no matter how many worst-case scenarios I concoct she talks me down from the ledge. In fact, she has managed to find enthusiasm for just about everything I’ve ever done (with the possible exception of body piercing). I used to take this for granted, as kids do. But now I admire her energy and patience.

She has always been a pretty amazing woman. A few months ago a family friend went through his old slides and scanned them. Here’s one of my mom, demonstrating the effortless natural beauty I’ve always envied AND the ability to wear yellow, which I most certainly did not inherit. I’m not sure she has ever realized it (her shyness about being photographed is evident) but she could have been a model. Instead she was busy with a career as a pioneering computer programmer. She had to fight to get hired, because employers would sneer that, as a young woman, she’d just leave to have kids in a few years and it wasn’t worth training her. She always played squash against men because she wanted tougher competition. She was a fantastic sailor and skier and can still more or less match me on the weights at the gym. A few years ago she left me in the dust when we climbed a mountain in Quebec (though she did come back to make sure I was still alive). She used to make her own clothes, and if I were small enough to fit into them I’d be wearing them myself. After she took an auto mechanics course my dad came home from work to find her in the car with only her combat-boot-clad feet visible as she checked out the wiring under the dashboard. She still has hysterical fits of laughter and is great fun to share a bottle of wine with.

I’m getting to know my mom as a fellow adult rather than just as a parent. I love to hear about what she thought or did when she was my age, and she would have been exactly the kind of person I’d have wanted to hang out with. So I’m lucky that she has forgiven me for the teenage years and become one of my best friends.

Happy birthday, Mom!





(Also, happy birthday to Gaby, an inspiring woman whom I miss dearly, and Marvelous Marv, who looks better in a Hawaiian shirt than anyone else I know.)