When you look back at your life, which is an activity much supported by the isolation and social distancing, you count your many blessings and you strive to figure out your greatest achievements.
Although I have had many achievements of which I feel I have a right to be proud, owing to the obstacles in my path along each of those routes, there is one I think is above all others.
Motherhood fell upon me, much like many another woman, I suspect. I didn't choose that path until I was on it, and then I chose it over and over again, when I came to yet another gate. Part of my choice was my age; I knew it would probably be my last chance. Part of it was a surprising longing for a baby, which I had never felt in my life before; I watched babies that I had never noticed before, and I marveled at all they represented. I wanted to experience that.
So much fear accompanied that decision, years and years of fear. Here was a powerless little person who depended entirely on me for protection, and care. No one can be prepared for carrying around a baby most of your waking hours, being at the beck and call of a little person who needs water, milk, food, clean diapers, and the age related varieties of need, for years to come. Here is a little person whom you literally teach to speak, to walk, to color, put puzzle pieces together, to relate to other people, to read!
And when you have done all that for as long as you possible can, you can look back on that achievement and marvel. Among the fortunate, I am a mother who raised a decent, responsible, noble and wise human being. I brought her into the world, supported her development in every way I could, and I got lucky, so amazingly and 'roll of the dice' lucky that my child was born safe and healthy - something out of our hands for the most part.
I won an art contest, I won a poetry contest, I independently published three books, I did many kinds of good work for which I received achievement prizes. I have college degrees with honors and I was a young woman who barely had a clue that colleges existed. There was never any college education mentioned to me when I was growing up. There was no hint of that expectation ever given to me. Three things drove me there: a friend who was going to college, a burning desire to understand more of the hidden layers of literature, the doors to college forced open by the student revolution in the late 60's and early 70's. All these things make me proud of my life, but the greatest beauty and marvel I can claim to have had a hand in, has been my daughter.
My daughter surpasses anything I could have imagined. It is true that with my tools and my inclinations, I may have, under different socio-economic conditions, gone on to find greater accomplishments in the wider world. It took me a long time to find the wider world. Perhaps there are great artists, musicians, poets, doctors, teachers, saints, who have achievements they value higher than my greatest achievement, but I haven't felt that so I can never know.
What I do know is that a simply marvelous human being exists in the world today who gestated in my body and whom I raised for eighteen years. She is a superb human being.
Pandemic ponderings on the porch -
Happy Trails, outward or inward.
Jo Ann
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