Mom’s Dreams
My mom is
great, I love my mom. I mean C’mon, who doesn’t love their mom? Here you can
insert all the clichés that everyone says about their mom, and they all apply
to my mom. And like most people, I really don’t believe I deserved all she
sacrificed and gave for me.
One of the things I love about my mom
is she has always been a dreamer. It’s like she and my stepfather were these
old vaudeville actors and they had this tired old bit, talking about their
dreams, that they trotted out every show like it was fresh and new. All you
could really do is watch the show and smile and nod and be as sincerely
interested as you could fake being.
My mom is almost seventy-five years
old and you know what she did this spring? She planted an orchard! A pecan
orchard or something. She’s imagining in a few years she will stroll along the
orchard lanes with a basket harvesting pecans, or whatever she’s growing in her
orchard. In five years she’ll be almost eighty! But that’s my mom.
I was in junior high when she married
my step-father. They are a match made in heaven. No truly, they are. There is
no way that two people who both live on dreams should live in the real world.
This mundane world has no place for them. They keep toiling on life’s lower
rungs, but they’re happy, very happy. Just up around the next bend the rainbow
is going to open up and cast its gold their way.
Like I say, I was in junior high when
I first heard their dreams, and I believed them, every word. By the time I was
sixteen I was beginning to wonder when this was all supposed to happen. By the
time I was eighteen I knew it was never ever going to happen. They didn’t have the
business sense to make a million dollars, so they had to rely on dreams
instead. For most this would be a poor trade, but it worked for them.
I think deep down they didn’t want
the dreams to come true, that wasn’t what their dreams were for. They
understood the joy was in the wanting, not the possessing, and they were rich
in want. Usually, folks burn out on the wanting and give up their dreaming. Not
my folks, not my mom. Wants were her wants. Her dreams never stopped feeding
her.
My wife and I are more pragmatic. My
wife is much more pragmatic. I just accepted that that was how my mom operated,
but it would just drive my wife up the wall. “How can they be so silly?” As if
there was an answer why puppies and kitties were so cute. They just are.
So when the time came, when I was
lying in a coma in the hospital, and the doctors were advising my family to
start looking into long term care facilities, that I saw the value in my mom’s
dreams. My young fiancé had a white knuckle grip on the hope that the nightmare
would end and I would be okay. Everybody, absolutely everybody, was advising
her that she should make a quiet exit. No one believed I would be anything more
than a vegetable. In fact, vegetable was too optimistic, I was destined to be
parsley, simply brushed aside as a useless annoyance in the meal of life.
Except my mom. As I lay dying, “Mike
is going to be alright. You watch, he’ll come through this better than ever.”
And my then fiancé, now my wife, always the pragmatic practical one, chose that
one time to believe my mom’s dream talk--and that one single solitary time my
mom’s dream was spot on. If she has lived her whole life on dreams and scant
else, just so that she could be the one to say I’d be okay that one time, and
give Linda a foundation of hope to build her own dream on, then I say humbly,
thank you, mom.
