March 16, 2013
Hey Winifred
Hey Winifred
About 4 years ago I was helping your Nana (my mom) and Papaw (my dad) clean out the space underneath the basement staircase at their house. There was quite a lot of junk under there - junk that had accumulated over the course of the 30 or so years they had lived together in that house. Most of it was just junk - old toys that once belonged to your Uncle and me, unused holiday decorations, and stacks of Papaw’s old fishing magazines. However, the further we got into the back of the closet, the stuff we began to uncover became older and older. We found some of Papaw’s high school football equipment and some of Nana’s old text books from nursing school.
And it was in a stack of those old books that I found it - an essay your Nana had written during her first year of nursing school about why she wanted to be a nurse. It was hand written in cursive - it looked like the handwriting I knew her to have, but somehow different. It was more loopy, more fluid, more legible. Mom wanted to throw it away. She said she remembered writing it and remembered how much she hated it (she always talks about how she hated writing essays in school). I immediately read it (it was about 2 or 3 pages long) and was also immediately fascinated by it. For me, it was like a kind of time capsule - I was getting a glimpse into my mother’s brain when she was around the same age as me. Even though it was something so arbitrary as an assigned essay, it gave me a window into my mom’s reasons for getting into nursing in the first place. It was the same reason I got into social work. Its cliche, yes, and it is the generic answer of almost every helping professional for why they get in to the field to begin with, but it’s overused because its so true - we really do want to help people.
That essay (which I did not throw away) gave me something valuable that I never would have had if I had not volunteered to help mom and dad clean out that closet. It gave me more insight into my mom - a person who I loved deeply, but who I’d never really thought of as anything more than my mom. Yes, I knew she was at one point younger, and thinner, and dated and played sports, and liked school, and helped out a lot in raising her younger siblings, and a myriad of other trivial facts. It is one thing to know those things, it is another to have all of those things immediately conceptualized in just a few moments of reading over a couple pages she actually wrote when she was doing and being all of those things.
So kid, that kind of brings me to the point of what I am trying to do right now by typing all this up. I don’t want you to have to go digging in a pile of junk to have that same experience - Someday, I want you to be able to view me (and maybe even your Dad) as people - not just as Mom and Dad. Yes, we are those things, and for you, we will always be those things, but we existed before you did. We had interests (mostly geeky), habits (mostly bad), and even aspirations (mostly to be happy and continuously awesome). You are going to be a great person. We will be better people because of you. We will all be freaking awesome together. If you ever get around to reading this, I hope you have the same thought I had when I found that essay, “Holy shit, my mom was/is a real person, and she was/is pretty flippin’ awesome.”
