Happy Birthday, Mom

Happy Birthday, Mom

" Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards " Soren Kierkgaard

There is nothing static in the ritual of birthday celebrations. They change considerably as we age. As a child, if you’re lucky, you have parties with cake and ice cream. You get presents, and the day centers around you, and how cool is that?

Teens still have parties, but with age comes the need to impress your friends, so the nature of the party changes. After you reach adulthood, birthdays are a bother. They are that yearly reminder that you are getting older, so you stop looking forward to them. Finally, in advanced age, if you are lucky, you become the center of attention again, as the celebration isn’t so much about the birthday, as it is about you.

My Mom has reached that stage of her life. She turns 87 this year, a bit beyond the three score and ten years mentioned in the Bible. Mom can certainly be counted as lucky in this regard. Not only has she reached an age that few see, she is reasonably healthy and is still able to get about her house and occupy herself with various little jobs. And to her family, she is still very much the matriarch of it.

Of course, as Art Linkletter once observed “Old age is not for sissies.” This simply means that you won’t get to be a senior if you can’t cope with the curve balls life is constantly throwing at you. Mom has had plenty of those, but she was able to deal with them, and better still, emerge from the more trying times of her life a bit stronger.

Well, perhaps that is what a deep, abiding faith will net you. Mom has been a church goer for as long as I can remember. But her faith isn’t one that she wears on her sleeve. Nevertheless, if you are around her, it becomes obvious by her actions. She has what can only be described as a sweet disposition, and never fails to wear a smile when she meets with anyone.

But she also has a history of committing random acts of kindness. These have ranged from helping to take care of her mother-in-law as she aged, to helping a neighbor lady give birth when she went into labor and there was no way to get her to the hospital, or, when she was able, cleaning the old church house her congregation once used.

Or helping her own mother after she left home to go to work during the Roosevelt administration. Her mother still had more than a few children in a home with neither electricity nor a washing machine in 1950. Mom was making all of $48.00 a month, but somehow managed to get her mother a gasoline-powered washer at the astronomical price of $300.00. That’s $2,745.00 in today’s money.

And for all of that she gets to enjoy a very special day this Friday, where she will once again be the star attraction at a birthday party, but this time with a very special guest, her great grandson, now six months of age, and about to embark on a lifetime of discovery that will include, we hope, many happy birthdays of his own.