The Humanitarian Coach

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Someone asked me this week what I wanted for Mother’s Day. After considerable thought, I decided what I really wanted was Clarity. I just want reassurance that my life has made sense–that I haven’t wasted all this time struggling to hold all the pieces together only to find that they didn’t actually ever fit in the first place. I long for some kind of overarching evidence that I’ve built a useful, productive life from all my seemingly random and sometimes incomprehensible experiences. My dad used to tell me that the remarkable brains of human beings keep a record of our lives, and someday we’ll be able to see the accumulation of evidence for everything we’ve ever thought or felt. He was confident that most of us will be gratified at our ending tally. For now, I’m counting on that.

A couple of years before I was married, a wise older friend told me that most people have no idea about the unconscious reasons for the choices they make until years later—whether it be for benefit or misery. I remember once somewhere in my mid forties asking my mother if she thought her life had been worth it? She had seen all her children graduate from college, but though she was by far the brightest member of the family, she never had the chance to participate in higher education herself. When she married my dad after WWII, she had left all the people she loved at home in Nevada to follow the Major/Colonel (as we kids sometimes called him when we were irritated about something) around the country from air base to airbase. Every two or three years my mom had had to start over with relationships, housing, schools, church congregations, even shopping and recreation. Now that I’ve been married for a very long time, I have some idea of what a sacrifice that must have been for her, and the exhaustion she must have felt every time my dad announced he had new orders, so we packed up yet again.

My mom’s answer to my question surprised me. She thought it over for a minute and then said, “If I had it to do over, I  wouldn’t change a thing.” Really? She was OK with choosing all that hard stuff? Again?

My mom was something of a quiet introvert by nature. I rarely heard her complain about the upheaval in her life—in fact, at the moment I can’t remember a single instance she voiced complaints—(to be fair, it was a LONG time ago so my memory is probably untrustworthy). But by the time I was an adult, she had taught me that “quiet” doesn’t mean weak. Unlike the many of the officers’ wives who lived around her, she didn’t spend afternoons playing cards at the Officer’s Club or indulging in gossip about who was getting promoted next. Instead, she spent her time learning. She became a talented cook and a gracious (in the old Southern sense of “gracious”) hostess. She was a self-taught artist—one of her paintings hangs on the wall across from me as I write. She read voraciously. Though we had a complete set of encyclopedias in the days before Google, mostly we just asked Mom when we needed to know something for a school assignment. On top of that, she was nice. To everyone. Every day. Without fail. —So nice that during my teen years, two different friends, one from Las Vegas and one from Albuquerque, asked me in all seriousness if I thought my mom might adopt them. Our house was the only safe place they had even known.

I was reminded of all this last week when my husband was walking through the living room and stopped abruptly in front of Daughter #1, who was sitting on our couch answering work emails. “I just want to thank you,” he said. “Having you as a daughter has made me a better person.”

Somewhat startled, she looked up from her computer, and said, “Thank you, I think?” She raised an eyebrow in my direction, clearly asking what brought that on?

I shrugged my shoulders. No idea.

“You’re kind of like those affirmation coaches who became popular in the 90’s,” my husband added. “Only instead of teaching me self-confidence and effective communication skills, you’re more like a humanitarian coach.” He actually got a little teary-eyed. (Aging seems to have opened a trickle of self-awareness that has escaped him until now.) “You and your siblings have helped me understand how necessary other people are in my life, and you all have made my life far richer than it would have been without you.”

She and I exchanged a glance. It was an unexpectedly humble admission from a man who is usually far more interested in the status of the Ukraine war or the art of gold prospecting than he is in human relations. She smiled in acknowledgement at her dad and then went back to work.

A humanitarian coach. I liked the sound of that. I realized with some surprise that exactly described what my mom had been for me. When we were young, she may have harbored more lofty ideas about the future adults her children might grow up to be, but we were all strong-willed and not easily swayed from our own unruly inclinations. And yet, despite ourselves, we saw the way she lived; her standards became the measurement by which we judged our own lives. The truth is maybe I don’t need some kind of angelic intervention to make sense of my fractured and occasionally incomprehensible life. I just need to know my mom is looking down from her front row seat in Heaven. And smiling.