What My Mom Taught Me: Just Do The Next Thing

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What My Mom Taught Me: Just Do The Next Thing

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My mom doesn’t read this Substack. We sit on opposite ends of the great divide. But she doesn’t hold my political shift against me, even if she doesn’t understand it. When I visit her, I often find CNN or the BBC filling up the silence. The same messages drone on and on: Trump is bad, the world is coming to an end, it’s all terrible. And there’s my mom, absorbing it like a sponge. It’s a wonder she talks to me at all. We get along because we studiously avoid any mention of the Orange Man or politics. She is always on one side, and I am almost always on the other. If it does come up, and she makes an off-handed comment, it’s like someone lighting a match near a gas leak. We can’t talk about it at all, none of it, and so we don’t. I’m grateful that politics doesn’t define her to the point that she would go “no-contact” with her own daughter. No one in my family went that far. I guess I’m lucky. I think they think I caught a crazy bug, and one day I will go back to normal. So we just tread water until things change. My mother’s life wasn’t what she wanted it to be, although whose is? She was a bright light who looked like an adult by the age of 12. At 14, she was pretending to be 16 to compete in beauty pageants. Here she is, at number 1.It wouldn’t last long, just a few short years. But it must have made her parents proud to see her star rise that fast. She never knew her biological father and still doesn’t, but those genes are partly what made her such a stunner.Not long after, she would meet a man, get pregnant, and drop out of high school. That would never become a marriage and a family. Eventually, she’d start working nights at Pandora’s Box in Hollywood, where she met my dad, a Jazz drummer. My dad would split, and she’d be a divorced mom with four kids before the age of 25. She was still too young to understand what she’d done to her life by having us, but over time, it would start to sink in, everything she gave up to raise us instead of chasing her own dreams. It wasn’t easy for her, that’s for sure, but we had what was kind of like a little farm, with goats, chickens, and ponies on top of a mountain in Topanga Canyon. Because I grew up in the era of blaming your parents for your bad childhood, we didn’t spend a lot of time thanking them for giving us life at all. We were too busy looking at what was wrong. But I can’t pretend it was all sunshine and roses either. It wasn’t. It was painful and explains why my life is the way it is now, at least partly.Understanding what shaped my life is different from blaming my mom, who really did do the best she could under the circumstances. We felt guilt throughout most of our childhood for having taken her life away from her. She gave up everything, it felt like, but now I bet she can’t imagine her life without us.Back in the 1970s, parents didn’t coddle their kids. We grew up like weeds. We had to learn how to survive, and it wasn’t shameful to punish your children or leave them to fend for themselves. Or teach them hard lessons. It’s just how it was. I don’t remember being very close to my mom. She didn’t comfort me when I cried. If anything, she tried to toughen me up. I was too sensitive for her liking. But I do remember her holding me in the Pacific, taking me out into the waves to show me that I could do it, since I was too afraid. I remember feeling close to her then, and it’s one of the only times I've felt that way. I was still scared of the water, but I felt safe in her arms, and I’ll forget how warm and soft her skin felt as I clung to her through the crashing waves. The truth is that we were lucky to have that life, at least in the early days before we left Topanga. We spent every morning until night living in the wild. We were always barefoot, always with our hands and feet in nature. I remember plunging into the mud during rainstorms, tasting different kinds of grass, watching the weather turn, and the smell of my pony’s fur after a long ride. Ultimately, how things changed in the coming decades, after Columbine and 9/11, how kids were over-protected, I am grateful I got the harder, rougher childhood. It prepared me for right now, for living through this era of people mostly online, of coddled children, of dehumanizing each other and tribal warfare, of cancellations and assassinations, and overly medicated and emotional women who couldn’t handle the election of the Orange Man. What I learned from my mom was hard work and resilience. The reason I work every single day, and have ever since I started working online over 20 years ago, is my mom. Her words have often echoed in my mind over the years, “Just do the next thing. Keep moving forward.” Then again, for both of us, work is something we understand. The complications of everyday life, especially relationships, not so much.Just do the next thing is how you manage a messy life, or a broken life, or even a hard life -...

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