Just like Mom

April 6, 2009

It’s taking some getting used to, this working out of the home. I know I had dreamed recently of this being the perfect situation, but it is taking time to get accustomed to it. After all, I spent 31 years being like Fred Flintstone, carrying my brown bag off to work in the morning, hoisting words at the paragraph factory and then waiting for the 6 o’clock whistle to sound to return to the homestead.

Weirdly, I thought of my mother as I was making myself a cup of tea and looking out into the yard while I was taking a break from writing a travel story. Here I was all alone, except for the cat, writing, doing a little housecleaning and firing off a resume or two.

I remember my mother always being at home. We only had one car and, of course, my father took that to work. Mom didn’t know how to drive anyway. This was the 1960s. So for most of her life, Mom spent her days in near-isolation on Kelsey Drive in West Seneca. I don’t think she had many friends in the neighborhood. She liked to talk with her sisters on the telephone, but she was mostly limited to conversations with just one sister who lived in the Buffalo area. In the ‘60s, telephone calls to Olean, where her other sisters and her mother lived, required long-distance service and charges.

I never heard Mom complain about staying home. I know she walked to many places, like Gill’s delicatessen, the dentist’s office and she did some substitute teaching at St. Bonaventure Elementary School. But for the most part, she cleaned, cooked, read her books, recited the rosary and waited for Dad to come home at 4 p.m.

As I stood gazing out the kitchen window at the April drizzle which was morphing into snowflakes, I wondered if Mom was watching me, saying, “Like Mother, Like Son.”

I’m keeping myself busy writing and carrying out the flotsam of duties that have to be done before I start school next month. I find it’s important to keep the mind engaged, so as not to dwell on the task-filled future. In my daily reading of Wayne Dyer’s “Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life,” he states: “All we ever get is right now – that’s it. So we must avoid the inclination to magnify tiny events or worry about a future that may never arrive.”

Later, Dyer writes, “After all, how do you pursue a difficult course of study that will take several years to complete? By not projecting yourself into the future or using your present moments to worry.”

Whenever I have doubts about my course of action to leave the 9-to-5 world and delve into school, I think about the unanimous support I am receiving from all the members of my family and all my friends. With so many people providing me with love and energy, how can I not succeed?