“You can do whatever you want, achieve whatever you set out
to do if you’re willing to work hard to get there.” Mom said those kinds of
things all through our childhood, growing up years.
“You’ve done so much with your life,” she said, this from
the vantage point of her eightieth year, this said by a woman with many gifts,
raised in strict Victorian style and restricting patriarchy in an American
Bible belt.
ALL of my writing for the past 15 years has revolved around
the values, lifestyles and local society that has influenced me, governed me,
and perhaps imprisoned me. Each step I’ve taken started with a tentative step—the
first step being the most difficult, but commitment rising quickly. If I’m
going to take a step I am going to plunge forward…until a conflict arises
between what is best for me vs. what my family needs, all with my personal
perceptions based on what I know, mostly from my own experiences, my own
observations, my self-education.
Always I have put my family first. My journalism career was
good for me. If Mom hadn’t been at my back, pushing, urging, encouraging my
reluctant footsteps, I would not have spent 14 years in radio and print news.
But when I perceived my children at risk, I could not, in
good conscience, put myself ahead of them. I made the conscious decisions to
bring each of them into the world, at first tentative because parenting carries
such a deep, consistent commitment and dedication. But when that first step was
taken, my honor and commitment carried me full-speed ahead. I have NEVER regretted
those choices I made, even when an ignorant receptionist refused to assign an
appointment with my OB-GYN because my husband’s job was gone in the Economic
Malaise and we had no insurance. I should get an abortion, she recommended. I
feel such joy when I am sharing life with my twin daughters, now 26 years old.
What did that stupid woman know?
It’s not that I haven’t been published nationally. It’s that
I have my sights set on something more.
“You’ve done so much with your life,” Mom said.
It seems like there is so much yet to do. My motivation is
that I stand for my mother and my grandmothers who were not given opportunities
to excel with their gifts and talents, and to teach my daughters (birth and
adopted—that means my daughters’ friends who have called me Mom) and
granddaughters to learn who they are, why they are, to set their goals, dream
their dreams and reach for the stars.
Mom tried to do the same for me. I’d say she succeeded given
where she started from. I am passing the lessons forward. But it’s a two-way
street because my daughters are excellent teachers, too.
©2013 Cathy Thomas Brownfield ~ All Rights Reserved.
