Each milestone met with a push to the next step while I was hoping for just a congratulations, some form validation.
When I presented to you each accomplishment that I had worked hard to achieve- like carving out each tiny piece in stone- a second later we would be discussing the next step.
But these things I already knew about her. My mother is an ambitious person. My mother is my cheerleader, but one that cheers with tough love. What used to frustrate me, I now anticipate. Her expectations become a friendly challenge for me, and I could count on her eagerness for my next step.
Maybe you can sense that my mother and I might not function in the comforting, in-sync wavelength that I’ve heard about from other girls. I don’t call her about boys, nor about drama. She didn’t teach me about dresses or lipstick. We don’t gush; in many ways we don’t even relate. There are probably many things we don’t know about each other outside of the black and white, the technical.
But in the new year of 2011, we unpackaged all the french door office windows of our new house together: each wood-lined glass pane taken from it’s shipping box, wiped off cleanly, and stacked. We sat on the hardwood floor, in a completely empty house that she had designed and executed construction of in a mere ten months. As I sat there with her, alone in that new and beautiful house, my younger fourteen year-old self knew that I was witnessing something rare and real- the fruition of her hard-earned dream. And that New Years has been the most memorable to date….
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