My Mother is Just an Ordinary Person

Inauspiciously driving a Subaru, turbo-charged mind you, she gets to work on time, stays late, and still finds time for yoga -- three hour yoga with her best friend. She says some silly things, occasionally calling me Lloyd (her husband) or Lloyd, Michael. You can hurt her feelings with one sentence, just like anybody else. Always late to pick me up, her nickname became my "late mother," even though I always knew she'd be there eventually. And she's an ordinary klutz, thanks in part to her Morrison genes, of which she has ever so much more to thank.

Balancing career, love, and Michael-raising has been one rocky road at times, fraught with personal hardships to overcome. You always hazily dream of the reward from such endeavors, working hard to get there, and re-balancing when things begin to go the wrong way. Life is our lottery ticket, and the difference we make day in and day out with the people around us -- the world -- is our reward. That is the lesson my mother must have learned at an early age, and as any normal mother would she has passed it along to her child.

So, when she told me on Saturday she must go to Afghanistan via Scotland, that a tragedy had happened, it all seemed too ordinary. She does a job that no one else can do, at least anywhere near as well. "Soft targets" are the difference makers in the long run. They sink their roots into the soil below. Given a chance to grow, they bring food and stability to the homes around them. Fragile though they are, they yield the greatest sustaining power of all, and water and love is all it takes to keep them going. To a community they bring only possibilities, honest seeds for the soil -- nothing to kill or die for.

Even though we all breathe the same, eventually find sleep together, how we decide what is right is what makes us individual. Interestingly, at that very moment we invite everyone around us, and in time the rest of the spider web of people they have touched in the past and those still to be woven in the future. As I pull away from the airport and watch her, waving to me, it's the same person who needed a hug hours earlier. She's making a decision, a big one, wrought with emotion, and even though the world might not yet be ready, she is helping it to get there one step at a time.

She is my mother, a person we all share -- we all have to keep.