Raising Kids With Character

My poor dear Mother.

I was a challenging kid. Now this needs to be qualified. I excelled at school without much trouble. I didn’t ever get into fist fights. I wasn’t the brooding adolescent mess my older brother was. (I’m not sure he smiled from age 13-18.) I didn’t make bad friends (mostly because I didn’t have many friends to start with) and I didn’t go partying to try and find them.

But I was still challenging. For one thing I was weird and I know that weird kids can just be really challenging in a unique way. I did things like when my parents went out on a date I would write stories about how they parents died and then tape it to their door as a welcome home present. I also painted my room. Without permission. A lot. Now to be fair, I wasn’t one of those untalented, crayon-graffiti kids, I painted realistic piranhas on my wall and a huge tree and a floating island(?). And then there was the time I went off with a total stranger while on a family vacation to Israel. I was six and we were exploring Hezekiah’s tunnel, which the biblical king built to protect Jerusalem from dying of thirst during a siege. The problem is that I was terribly claustrophobic, the tunnel was very dark and the water was up past my waist. It wasn’t going to happen. So Mom and I left the fools (my family) to their sure destruction and went shopping among the street vendors. I quickly made friends with a kind gentleman who sat on some stone steps with me visiting. Mom only turned her back for a minute but at that moment he offered to buy me a 7up and I went for it. We were only gone for 5 minutes. But man… you sure see how much your mom loves you when she finds you after having walked off with a strange man in a strange land. Love looked strangely ferocious that day.

I was weird and challenging. I caused my parents no shortage of grief, but Mom always loved me. There was never any doubt of it. Even when I told her she DIDN’T love me because I thought it was cruel and unusual punishment to be sent to the barn to gather eggs (a job for which I was paid, incidentally), she told me, with red face, clenched lips and fiery eyes, that she did!

I felt her love when I wasn’t feeling well either. I started having migraines in grade 1 and although I didn’t know it at the time there were some real fears that something was wrong (medically that is… my siblings were quick to point out there many other things wrong with me.) Those headaches grew worse in grade four precipitated by a teacher who clearly did NOT love me and I missed 36 days of school that year. I remember Mom holding my head on her lap and crying softly saying that she didn’t know what do anymore.

A mother’s love is a rich thing and I’m grateful for that. But I’m also grateful that she was weird like me! She is the one, after all, who blew the microwave door clean off because she forgot to cut the spaghetti squash in half before cooking it. She is the one who played the part of the surgeon when she and Dad came home to find me with a gaping fake hole in my chest, covered in red crafting paint. And she is the one who tried furiously to get her butt under water using my flippers on a vacation in Florida. We almost died laughing together.

I love you Mom! Happy Mother’s Day.