Mothers Day is Sunday, so if you haven’t purchased your cards or flowers yet you better get on the ball. Your mom may not live up to your expectations of June Cleaver or Carol Brady, but most of them do the best they can and let’s face it, you probably weren’t exactly Pollyanna. So this week’s Friday Five honors MOTHERS.
- What’s the most important lesson you learned from your mom?
- What’s one thing you WISH your mom would’ve told you?
- Who is your favorite mother and daughter from fiction?
- What woman who is not your mother has had the biggest influence in your life?
- In what ways have you turned into your mother?
Leave your answers in the comments. My responses after the jump.
- My mother once told me when I was young that I could start my day over at any time. I never really understood what she meant by that but I see now that she was talking about changing your attitude. At any point - in your day, or in your life - you can stop, breathe and say, “OK, enough. I’m going to try a different path.” I’m still not very good at it, but it’s something I’m always striving for.
- That the hot pink lip gloss and shimmery purple eyeliner I wore in 1983 wasn’t all that attractive.
- I love M’Lynn and Shelby Eatenton from Steel Magnolias. I didn’t actually know any mother-daughters who were much like this, but I always imagined there were a lot of them behind Southern, small-town doors.
- I lived with my dad in high school and spent a lot of time at my best friend Shelley’s house. Her mom was a sort of stand-in for me during those years. She was a really young and cool mom who was very active in our lives - mine as much as Shelley’s. She kept up with all the goings-on of our classmates and helped us keep a perspective on things like whether or not Suzanne Gautier’s insistence on wearing an off-white gown in the Senior Homecoming Court was a snub to Christi Schexnayder’s queendom.
- Every time I look in the mirror I get a little freaked out by the fact that my mother is looking back at me. People have told me for years that I look just like her and now that I’ve reached the age that I remember her being, I actually see it myself. Also, based on this photo? I’m guessing I got a little of my sass from her as well.
Responses to “Friday Five”
May 12th, 2008 at 9:45 am
1. What’s the most important lesson you learned from your mom?
You have to go after the things you want; they are not going to fall in your lap.
2. What’s one thing you WISH your mom would’ve told you?
Opinions are best kept to myself.
3. Who is your favorite mother and daughter from fiction?
The four mothers/daughters in “The Joy Luck Club.”
4. What woman who is not your mother has had the biggest influence in your life?
Carol Shaffer.
5. In what ways have you turned into your mother?
Oh, the things I say! I open my mouth and her words come out … and I promised myself when I heard them as a child that I would NEVER say them to my children.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:07 am
1. The most importan thing my mother taught me is how Not to be. I know that sounds harsh, and it has been a long road of me wishing I had a different mother, or wanting her to be different, or trying to help her be different. The world idolizes mothers. You hear how great they all are. When yours is not good, it’s hard to know what to do with that feeling. Eventually, I have tried to accept it for what it is, and be different in my own role as mother.
2. I wish she had told me more about birds and the bees. She never told me and then I was shocked one day when I started my period.
4. Other woman besides my mother who made an impact: Definitely my grandmother. I stayed with her while my mom worked and she was more of a mother to me than my own mother.
5. I don’t think I have become her, but I do have her body type and I’m reminded of it when I look in the mirror. I also catch myself yelling at my kids sometimes which she did a lot.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
1. The most important thing my mom told me is that I could be anything I wanted to be. She gave me the idea that there were no boundaries for me … what a gift.
2. I wish she’d told me how much WORK it is to be anything I want to be, as well as a wife, mother and friend.
3. I love Jo and Marmee from Little Women.
4. My friend Kaye comes closest to having that kind of unconditional love for me — along with good advice when I ask for it.
5. It’s strange: I see her most in my hands. They look just like hers, though she was much more careful about her manicure. I loved those hands.
May 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
1. What’s the most important lesson you learned from your mom?
2. What’s one thing you WISH your mom would’ve told you?
3. Who is your favorite mother and daughter from fiction?
4. What woman who is not your mother has had the biggest influence in your life?
5. In what ways have you turned into your mother?
Wow, some hard questions here. I had trouble answering these.
1. I guess the most important thing I learned from my mom is something she taught me by example. I’ve never felt discriminated against, never worried about whether I could do something because I was a woman. A lot of the time when I hear other women talk about their experiences with discrimination, it’s hard for me to relate, because that hasn’t been my experience. I just do what I do (and I’m usually the only female on my team at work) and mostly the men don’t even think about me being a woman. It’s harder for people to knock you down when you have your head held high.
2. You know, when I try to think of things that I wish my mom had told me, it usually turns out that she DID tell me, I just didn’t listen at the time.
3. Trying to find a favorite mother from fiction I kept running into one little problem… most of them were real people. For example, I love the grandmother from “I Know why the Caged bird sings,” but she isn’t fictional, she was Maya Angelou’s real grandmother. I love the mom from “I Remember Mama” but she was also a real person. Same with “Cheaper by the Dozen.” I think there’s a lesson here that real mothers are more amazing than anything writers can imagine.
4. I’d like to mention two. My grandmother took care of me a lot while I was growing up because my mother was working and going to school. She was the best grandmother in the world - she would play with me and listen to my stories about fictional characters for hours. She was an actress and an amazingly charismatic person who taught me that ordinary life could be lived as an adventure. One of the little things she did was never take the same road to the same destination twice… she liked to turn down a road she had never driven before and see what was there.
The other was the trainer at the barn where we kept our horses. Most of what I know about dedication, hard work, and sportmanship comes from her.
5. When I answer the phone these days, people sometimes mistake me for my mother.
When I was little, I was very shy, and my mother liked to talk to people we met while out shopping and so on. I was usually horribly embarrassed and wanted her to stop talking to people. She told me that as a child, she had also been shy (I didn’t believe her) and that everyone had a story to tell. Well… now that I’m an adult, I also talk to everybody. I just learned a lot about France from my server at Ryan’s steakhouse, who as it turns out is a Frenchman with an internet business. Everyone DOES have a story. And if you make the effort to connect with people, most of them love to tell their stories.