This one's for you, Mom.

Early, early in the morning on Saturday, April 24, 2004, I sat in a hotel lobby in Malmö, Sweden, next to my mother. We were clutching fruit from the hotel breakfast and both avoiding looking at each other. It was a tense 15 minutes or so we sat there before deciding we couldn’t take it any more and walking out the door to the stop where the bus could come to take my mom to the airport. It is a morning I remember vividly; it was the last day of my mother’s solo trip to Scandinavia to visit me during my semester abroad.

I can’t say that it was a morning that either of us enjoyed. While we seemed to have an unspoken agreement that we had a hell of a good time over the past ten days, neither of us was quite ready to see it end. I had hundreds of amazing and irreplaceable experiences while I was abroad, but it was also one of the times in my life when I was the most unhappy. I struggled a lot personally and socially, and having my mom there had been a blessed relief from that. My mother knew all this, even if she never really said it out loud, and while a part of her had to be relieved to go home, she was reluctant to leave me. I was near tears for most of that morning, and once Mom boarded the bus and it pulled away without me, I did cry. But before that happened, she said something to me that I will never forget.

When she saw the bus pulling up and hugged me goodbye, she said, “I want to thank you for giving me this adventure. I never would have done this if it wasn’t for you.” I don’t know what I said in response, because the comment didn’t seem all that significant at the time. But I thought about it a lot during my remaining time in Sweden, and at certain moments in my life since.

It’s not that I didn’t understand what my mom meant by it. I did. She met my dad when she was in high school and has been with him ever since. While there’s no regrets associated with that, I know she hasn’t had a lot of chances in her life to do things on her own. She’s told me before that one of the only things she wishes she had done earlier in her life is live by herself. As scary as doing things on your own can be, there’s also a king of thrill and satisfaction in it. My being in Sweden gave my mom the chance to travel internationally by herself, and she was grateful. I understand that.

What surprised me about the comment was the way it has changed my perspective over the years. While in some ways I am a carbon copy of my mother, this is one way in which we are very, very different. My mom has never really been on her own, whereas sometimes I feel like being on my own is all I’ve ever really known. I have been blessed with some amazing friends over the years, and with the exception of Sweden, I’ve never felt completely isolated. But I’ve also never been in a real, exclusive relationship that makes me feel like someone will always be there. There are always people around who I can ask for help, but ultimately, I am responsible for all my problems, all my big decisions, and the direction my life goes. That’s true of people in marriages and relationships too, I suppose, but someone else will be affected when they make decisions, and someone else can help them make them. There’s someone you can ask to come and get you when you are stuck at an airport in Indianapolis, and someone you can call at 6:30AM to ask to come and shower at their apartment because your hot water is out again. As much as I love and cherish my friends, those are not things I feel I can ask of them. At those moments, I am on my own in a way my mom has never been.

This is an issue I’ve struggled with since high school. As independent as I am, I also am self conscious about my lack of a dating history. I’ve never really understood why things seem to happen so naturally for everyone else, yet nothing has happened for me in 26 years. It’s an aspect of my life that I always have found regrettable.

But at the moments when I start to get down about it, I think about that day in Sweden and what my mom said. There are a lot of things I have to do on my own, yes. But there are people who will never have the chance to do those things on their own, either. Not everyone will have the chance to claim the victories over opposition that I have. That tearful day in Malmö, my mother taught me how to see struggles as opportunities. I’m not sure I’ve ever thanked her for that.

That’s only one of many, many brief episodes with my mom that I recognized the significance of only after the fact. My mother is not one to talk about her own feelings – at least not to me. While we can talk on the phone for hours, she mostly lets me tell the stories. She also is not one to teach you anything directly; she’s more likely to wait and let you ask the question first. I don’t have strong memories of her teaching me to shave my legs or discussing her own experiences in college with me. I remember all my mother’s impacts on my life in a different way. This excerpt from my Sweden journal, written about that morning in Malmö, captures it pretty well:

When the bus turned the corner, I hugged her one last time, told her it really wasn’t so long til I came home, and watched her board the bus. I mouthed that I loved her through the window, watched the bus pull away, and took a deep breath to gain control of myself before slowly making my way to the train station. I sat on a bench for a little while in the train station writing in my journal, hoping it would make a little of the emptiness go away… The ride back to Växjö was uneventful, I just wrote a little more and stared out the window. It didn’t feel as peaceful as most train rides do, and I was still feeling very empty and alone, but all in all I really wasn’t doing as bad as I expected at that point. I got off the train in Växjö, renewed my bus pass, and walked back here. I came in and set my stuff down and looked around. There was the plant Mom had bought me, and there were the neat piles of paper she had cleaned up. There was my bed all nicely made, and there was the feather she had put on my computer. Everywhere I looked was a sign that she had been there, and that was when I burst into tears.

No, my mother is not one to talk. But when she does tell me things, like when she thanked me for her adventure, they really mean something, and they really stick. And the excerpt above shows that even when she doesn’t talk, somehow, she finds a way to leave her mark. I have no doubt that the way she parented has both allowed me to become independent in a way that serves me well, and shaped me into a person I’m proud to be.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.