It’s been a hot second since I actually sat down and wrote an article to publish here (I needed a little mental health break), but I’m back this week with a very special article that I want to dedicate to my mom for her birthday.
Laura Moss is truly one of the greatest human beings I’ll ever have the privilege of knowing. Even though I’m her youngest of three kids spread across ten years and our age difference is significant, I’m lucky enough not just to be able to call her my mom, but to be able to call her one of my best friends, too (now that I’ve gotten past the angst stage and made it through to the adulthood on the other side…for the most part).
She is incredibly intelligent, witty, loyal, hardworking, caring, strong, and generally embodies every character trait I aspire to have as a woman (and who knows, maybe even as a mother) myself.
I really wanted to do something special for her birthday this year, more so than giving her a material gift (don’t worry Madre you’ll still be getting that too), and if you know me you’ll know I’m really big on gift planning so needless to say I’ve been contemplating what I wanted to do for a while. Then one day I woke up and I thought hey, I have this awesome platform right here at my fingertips, why don’t I surprise her with an article all about her and her general badassery that she can read on her birthday?
So, without further ado and in honor of her birthday being on the seventh day of the month, here are seven of the many things I’ve learned from my mom over the years. Happy birthday, Mama! I love you queen!
1. Getting what you want takes A LOT of hard work and dedication.
My mom was a stay at home mom for the first six years of my life (having two kids in elementary school and a newborn baby at home will do that to you), but when our situation changed and she had to go back to work she put herself out there and applied for a part-time job at the brand new Kohl’s they were building in Loveland at the time. She got the job (obviously because she’s awesome) and worked her way from part-time up to full time, to head of the shoe department (I used to love telling my friends she was the head of the shoe department) and then head of the home and kids department, and then all the way up to area supervisor with keys to the store like a real boss lady.
She did all of that through me making her feel guilty every time she had to work on my birthday or when I had a swim meet when I was still too young to understand that she was doing it all for us, and through my dad working out of town a lot for a few years in there when there were still two kids at home to shuttle around, and she’s still there over a decade later. I’ve told her this before, but I’m deeply impressed and proud of and deeply grateful to her for that.
2. Personality is an asset, not a flaw.
My mom and I have this trait in common where we bring a lot of sarcasm and attitude to situations where some people might not find it to be the most pleasant, but we don’t always do it on purpose. It usually just comes out as a natural part of our personalities; neither of us are naturally very outwardly happy or bubbly at all hours of the day (we both have a good case of RBF if I’m being honest) and we make sarcastic comments here or there because that’s a big part of our humor.
We’ve also both been put in a lot of situations in our lives where people try to put our personalities in the con column (as though that’s something that can be put up for debate), but what I learned from my mom before I was put into too many of those situations myself was that those people who criticize you don’t matter and shouldn’t have any influence on how you go about your life. I can think of a lot of moments in my life where I’ve seen her personality get tested, but in each of those moments I watched her keep her head high and refuse to apologize for who she is and I think (although an example she might not have known she was setting) that’s something that has really helped me when I get faced with similar challenges.
3. Family is thicker than water. (Side note: I know the expression is ‘blood is thicker than water’ but I’ve always kind of hated that because you don’t have to be related by blood to think of someone as family)
There are a lot of different explanations and examples I could give for this one, but in the interest of not getting too insanely personal I think I’ll just say that every time my mom comes to a crossroads between the people she calls family and something else, she always stays true to the family road which is something I find really admirable because that’s something not everyone would be able to do if they were put in similar situations.
4. Everything happens for a reason.
This one is pretty self explanatory and relates in some ways to #3, but this philosophy has been a big theme in my family ever since I can remember and most of my memories of that specific phrase being used come through in my mom’s voice. I think growing up with that philosophy sort of hanging in the air is what has shaped my perspectives on a lot of different things in life, and I really give a lot of credit for that to my mom because not only did she get that idea into my head, but she is also an embodiment of life being about staying strong through the worst times so that you can hit the fresh grass on the other side.
5. If you were born with good hair, don’t take it for granted.
Every time I get my hair cut short, my mom tells me a version of the same story about how her mom (shout out to Barbara for giving birth to my mom on this day in 1965 by the way, I wouldn’t be here writing this without her) never let her grow her hair long when she was younger and now she can’t grow it long at all and if she could have long hair she would never cut it that short and so on and so forth. As I’ve written about before and as the picture below clearly shows, I haven’t always followed that advice, so I’m not sure this actually counts as something I’ve learned per say. Still, I wanted to include it in here because for some reason I always really enjoyed hearing that story growing up and it’s something that always pops into my head before I make any impulsive and potentially horrible hair decisions.
6. Everything in moderation, except for chocolate.
My mom really, REALLY loves chocolate. The first half of that is actually a lesson that never fully took for me because I’m really not much of a moderation kind of person, but I do use this advice to tone myself down from time to time. As for the second half, there is always some kind of chocolate in the house for me to steal when I’m home and I am very grateful for that.
Side note: for every special occasion every single year, my dad always, without fail, gives my mom flowers and some kind of chocolate, so in a weird way her love for chocolate played a part in the example of love my parents’ relationship set for me.
7. Matching shirts with your mom might be dorky, but it’s also pretty damn cool.
My mom and I both have a thing for long sleeved shirts with thumb holes, so when I bought this shirt from the bookstore for myself last year and found out it had thumb holes I couldn’t resist buying one for her too. This was followed by multiple incidents of me coming home or walking downstairs after getting dressed to find her in the same shirt as me — this particular incident was on our way to do our taxes, which was quite the experience, but I was proud to be unapologetically dorky out in public with such a cool human being.