Blogocentric Formulations

Mommy Dearest

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  | May 10

Prompt ▼

The prompt today is very simple: Write about the person you call Mom.

My mom is my actual mother. I grew up in a traditional nuclear family, where my parents are my birth parents, are still married to one another, and raised two kids in the suburbs. I'm really close with my mom, and get a great deal of my personality traits and perspectives on things from her. My father is her polar opposite in a lot of ways. He's outspoken, she's quiet. He's set in his ways, she's adaptable. He's staunchly conservative, she's... less conservative.

She graduated from college with a degree in journalism, and worked in journalism for a few years before she had me. Once the kids came along, my mom became a stay-at-home mom for several years, until we were in the later stage of middle school and able to take care of ourselves at home after school. At that point, she went back to work and started her second career working at a series of microelectronics companies in an administrative capacity. One of the things that I found most impressive about her was the fact that once, when one of her employers was acquired by a big, national firm, their administrative software was converted to SAP. If you've ever used SAP before, it's a beast. One of those programs that does a million different things, is the backbone on which a thousand systems operate, etc. And she trained herself to know it (or at least the parts that applied to her company) inside and out. By the end of the company merger/acquisition process, she was training the IT guys on how to use it.

I think it's easy to look at someone in my mom's position (gave up her career to stay home and raise kids) and write her off as a cliche. But if there's one thing I've learned from my mother, it's that she - and I'm sure plenty of other strong moms like her - are so incredibly capable of so much more, even if they do choose to stay at home. My mom is smart, accomplished, and has thrived in every phase of life she's found herself in... and definitely where I get a lot of my values, including the professional ones that have guided my own career over the years.