Becoming a parent has given me many opportunities to reflect on my own childhood.  As I interact with my baby, I imagine my own parents caring for me.  I understand better than ever the sacrifices they made and the joys and worries they felt.  So today, my first Mother’s Day as a mom, I pay homage to my own mom.

I think about my first fender bender, the summer before my senior year of high school, and how my mom drove about 90 miles per hour from her workplace to the scene of the accident to make sure I was ok.  I think about the time I was a small child, swimming in my neighbor’s pool, not yet a very strong swimmer.  I let go of the side wall and slipped under the water, beginning to panic as I feared I wouldn’t be able to float.  I heard my mom’s muffled voice through the water, and within seconds, she was lifting me up to safety.  On so many occasions throughout my life, she has comforted me, protected me, and lifted me up.

My mom is resilient and resourceful.  She’s a boss.  A couple of years ago, I talked to her about her early working experiences and learned that she had done some pretty cool things.  In high school, she took a class on how to operate a special kind of printing press.  When she graduated in 1967, she got a job working for the Masland company, one of the big factories in town, operating their press.  “They had this equipment and they didn’t have anyone who knew how to operate it.”  She did that job for about a year before taking a summer off (her only experience as a housewife) and then moving onto secretarial work at a construction company and law firm.

Then she got a job with the Frank Black company, a local business that did various kinds of contractor work.  My mom was in the part of the business that designed and built water treatment plants.  “That’s how I learned to read blueprints,” she told me.  She was basically a project manager, visiting sites, reviewing plans, and making sure everything was completed on time and according to speculations.  My mother had no business degree, no engineering degree, just a high school diploma.  She was a woman, managing a bunch of men in a male-dominated industry in the 1970s.  What a badass.

Frank Black eventually sold his company to a guy who ousted everyone and replaced them with his own family members, so Mom found herself out of a job.  After a brief stint as a receptionist at an optometrist’s office, she got a job working for a local trucking company.  The owner gave her a lot of responsibility; she was basically his right-hand man.  She would get calls about the business around the clock.  One day, her boss called to tell her that he was having a heart bypass the next day, and she would be in charge of everything for several weeks while he was gone.

When I came along, the pressure of being on call day and night became too much.  The late night phone calls were waking me up and preventing everyone in the family from getting enough sleep.  It was time for a change.

So, when I was about two and a half years old, my mom marched into the office of the president of another trucking company in town and convinced him to hire her.  She didn’t let him down.  She worked long days and weekends, doing whatever needed to be done.  She was involved in the national industry organization.  She traveled across the country to customer sites (which I thought was very cool when I was a kid).  She spent more than two decades at that company, through mergers and changes in leadership, eventually retiring a bit earlier than planned when her position was moved to Nebraska.  She found transportation and logistics really interesting and enjoyed working with regulatory agencies and learning about new technology.  But she had no interest in relocating at 64.

I asked her if she would ever consider working again, and she said she might like to be back in the industry, to catch up on the changes in recent years.  More likely, though, she would take a job in retail that would allow for more creativity, designing displays or arranging flowers.  She is constantly reinventing herself.

My mom encountered a number of personal challenges throughout her life as well.  She struggled with infertility and disappointments in trying to adopt a child.  She cared for my dad through a number of health scares, one of which involved navigating a foreign city in which she had just arrived, communicating with doctors whose primary language she did not speak, and figuring out how to pay for a hospital visit in a foreign country.  She herself battled cancer not once, not twice, but four times.  Ovarian cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer.  Multiple doctors have told her she probably shouldn’t be alive today.  But my mom is a fighter and a survivor.  She knew people were depending on her, and there was no way she was going to give up.

I hope some of my mom’s boldness and willingness to rise to a challenge has rubbed off on me.  I certainly wouldn’t be the person I am without her influence.  Thanks for being so awesome, Mom!  Happy Mother’s Day!