Dear Mom

Dear Mom,

I am so grateful you are my mom, and that you are still on the planet with us. I love you. I appreciate your wisdom, and respect your deep intuition and care. Thanks for giving me life, caring for me, walking me through the stages, getting me a toy after each of the many shots the doctor gave me. Thanks for helping me to be an individual by dressing me in cute and awkward clothes. Thanks for rescuing me from my bad dreams and night terrors. Thanks for unconditionally accepting me.

Thanks for all the thousands of chats on the phone, and for still being able to give me a pep talk in a moment of adversity. Thanks for all of my birthday parties. Thanks for grandma and grandpa and bubbee. Thanks for your positivity. Thanks for joining my destiny synagogue, because the experiences there helped me find my work and passion. Thanks for your poems for every occasion. You succeeded. I am alive, mentally and physically well and love life

Now, you are in your golden years and I am at the middle of mid-life. I am glad we are here together at this time.

I am learning that youth is about observing and judging those around us, thinking we know better. I am finding Mid-life is about gradually releasing our preoccupation with what others think of us, who likes us, and who doesn’t. “Approval worship” and obsession with praise and appreciation is slowly diminishing.

I am anticipating the goal of our elder years, the passage and graduation of that milestone combines the observation of others that highlighted youth, the releasing of “what others think about us” of mid-life, and the sacred departure from judging others comes with the wisdom of “old age”.

The elder can observe himself, those younger and those around him, love what is, see what is not perfect and love it too. It is all holy and perfectly imperfect.

Mom, you have come to accept whatever lifestyle or partner or career your children and grandchildren have chosen. You have joyfully welcomed new additions to our family and lost loved ones with the same tears.

The challenge we face in elder years is to allow ourselves to have, appreciate and love our observations, to speak our thoughts of love and joy and “naachas” and yes, to tolerate our thoughts of criticism, judgment, our opinions about what others should do and how they should and shouldn’t live.

Our challenge is to see and ingest and love and cherish the good thoughts, and to let the negative thoughts, judgments, criticisms, blames, guilt’s, should’s and shouldn’ts and could haves and would haves, and all the stress and the futility of “trying” dissolve and be carried away by the wind.

We cannot change others, mold them to our liking, fashion their behavior. We can barely mentor and guide others. What we can do is appreciate, love, accept, withhold judgment, and respectfully suggest.

It sustains us in old age to laugh at the irony and absurdity of it all, watch the drama go by and love the moment and whatever it brings.

That is what I am learning from watching my mom. And by the way mom, at this juncture, and this moment and passage, you can actually have anything you want.

Just ask for it, open your arms and it will come towards you with warmth and embrace. Take it!

I love you mom and am so fortunate to have you here to hear this.

By Rick Concoff MA  c 2013