Mom

One of my favorite movie lines is from My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding:

“The man is the head of the house, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.”

I had a front row seat watching this same scenario unfold between my parents during my childhood.

Mom was and is the touchstone of our family. She handled the money, managed our household and raised Anthony and me with a gentle strength that was both nurturing and no-nonsense. Mom taught us patience, perseverance, and pride in a job well done. She valued honesty, trustworthiness and proper grammar. And, consequently, all these things are now important to me.

As the family troubleshooter, she approached life’s challenges by developing an action plan. For example, when we found out I would be bedridden during the first three months after my spondylolisthesis surgery, she transformed our dining room into a bedroom so I would be downstairs “where the action is.”

Mom was cool and confident, with a great sense of style – traits I sorely lacked. And, in the random spirit of genetics, my daughter is just like her!

Similarly, aside from physical traits, Mom is nothing like her own mother (more about Grandma in a future post). Instead, she emulated her father’s mother, who lived with my mother’s family during Mom’s childhood.

When I think about great-grandma Chuckerel, I envision kind, gentle hands that taught Mom how to cook and bake like an Italian, and how to love a child like only a mother can. Mom was a stellar student and, just as surely as hair or eye color, these traits will continue to pass from one generation to the next in our family, because of her.