7 Ways My Mother Shaped Me Into the Man I Am Today
Happy Mother's Day, Mom! This One's For you!
Dear Mom,
Well, I’ll be 40 next year. And as you’ve no doubt noticed lately in our phone conversations, I’ve been looking backward into my own history and both sides of our family to understand better the various forces and influences who have most shaped me.
And in looking back over the last four decades, I can say with conviction that your decisions in raising me and influencing me were primarily were for the better. All in all the ledger is very much in your favor. Here are some of the concrete ways in which I see the goodness which you have influenced in my life:
You imprinted on me the model of the qualities in a woman I would then seek in my life. One thing that I’ve very much noticed in my fellow males is that we tend to either pursue women in various ways like our mothers if the relationship was largely positive, or we pursue the opposite types of women if the relationship was negative. In our case it’s very much the former. Most of the women to whom I’ve been drawn - and the one to whom I am now engaged today - reflect aspects of your personality, career aspirations, and lifestyle choices. I see this as very much a positive thing and am appreciative that your influence has now contributed into my being guided toward and loving
.You have always modeled being kind to people, and in spite of my often warlike rhetoric in my writing, I very much strive to do the same whenever I can. You have been an important influence in my efforts to strive to be a better person.
You were key in influencing me to become a writer, with your love of reading and the strong imprint that your profession as a librarian had on me. My general habit these days is to aspire to go to the library at least twice a month - preferably weekly - and emerge each day with a heavy armful of books which I have not read so I can sample widely. I also now very much understand the library as a place to conduct research professionally. Your doing!
The seeds for my political journalism and activism were planted by you. You were the one who provided my feminist sensibility, liberalism, and Democratic Party partisanship early on in my childhood. Learning the importance of political engagement early on was probably a central reason why I would eventually major in the subject and then spend over a decade writing on political themes.
You also laid the foundations for my sense of skepticism and degrees of agnosticism. I hadn’t realized until our recent discussions that your agnosticism goes back as far as third grade. But I can see now how you raising me with such a mindset now crept into my own temperament and ideological tendencies. Thank you. This has helped me so much avoid falling into cults of personality - or at least not for long in the times when I have!
I appreciate your emotional support so much. And it has crept into my own personality as I’ve developed a tendency to try and counsel friends in distress and listen to the people I love when they’re going through one frustration or another.
Finally, your and Dad’s support of me during my PTSD has been crucial to my recovery so it is entirely fair to say that your influence has helped keep me alive. Thank you.
OK, I’ll be calling you shortly for the traditional Mother’s Day call. Love you!
endless appreciations,
David