A Girl...

The Best of the Best

I have the best mom in the world. When I was little, she sang me songs and taught me how to read and indulged my constant need to be tested on my spelling and math skills. She let me have pets that taught me about love and the miracle of life and the harsh reality of death. She taught me not to litter and not to talk to strangers. She said that if someone was bullying me, I could tell him three times in a calm, clear, and respectful tone to leave me alone and then if he still didn't leave me alone, I had her permission to pop the kid in the nose (which I did, once, to my arch-nemesis/sometime-best-friend Jenny Berg from down the street). My mom taught me to stand up for myself, to stand up for my little brother, to stand up for what I believed in.

She took me to puppet shows, magic shows, Shakespeare plays, and modern dance concerts. She took me to swimming lessons when I was nine months old, T-ball when I was ten, ballet when I was sixteen. When I was eleven, she took me to the mall to get my ears pierced and then let me back out of it even after I'd gotten in the chair and had the piercing lady mark my lobes with a purple marker and everything. She hand-sewed my Halloween costumes every year except those when it was very important to my social life that I not have a hand-sewn costume. She was my Girl Scout leader, my chauffeur, the one who surprised me in school with donuts and balloons on my birthday, the one who designed the sets for the school plays, the one who made me the most spectacular birthday cakes, beyond a kid's wildest dreams.

She once ruined my coolest pair of stonewash jeans by patching over the rad holes in the knees with little blue and yellow teddy bears with button eyes. When I was in eighth grade, she wouldn't let me go to Classic Skating with my friend Liz because she knew I was going to meet a boy there. She made me take piano lessons but she let me take guitar lessons. She made me try scary new foods. But she never made me clean my plate. She wears costumes with confidence.

My mom is the best mom in the world, but she is also an extraordinary person. Part of that has to do with her being a nurse. She starts IVs on the tiniest preemies with veins the thickness of a single hair; she gives CPR to mothers of five; she brings comic books to teenage skiers who break their legs on the slopes and are waiting alone in the hospital for their parents to fly in from the East Coast the day after Christmas. When a crazed man with bombs and a gun took hostages in her maternity wing in the early nineties, she coordinated the hospital's evacuation and made sure all the patients were safe and taken care of. When people lose a loved one, she helps them grieve but also asks them for organ donations to save the lives of others. When the kid across the street splits his lip, she gives him a popsicle to distract him but also to keep the swelling down. When Jenny Berg, the girl from down the street, was four months old and stopped breathing and turned blue, my mom saved her life, not knowing she would be the bane of my existence until I turned nine and went to a different school.

Last month, my mom graduated with a master's degree in nursing, finishing what began as a basic R.N. degree almost thirty years ago. She graduated with honors, wrote a thesis, learned PowerPoint, taught a few undergraduate classes, made some friends, served on a community panel that wrote editorials for Salt Lake's major newspaper, and gave a commencement speech in front of the entire School of Nursing. Unlike the other student speakers, who celebrated themselves and their own accomplishments and talked on and on about how hard Mr. Professor's tests were and how heavy the Nursing 101 textbook was, she spoke with depth and clarity and wisdom about what it means to have a job that requires not just learned technical skills but qualities like caring, compassion, and sometimes a good dose of humor in the most difficult and painful situations. At the end of her speech, she quoted Homer Simpson, threw a handful of sparkly confetti on herself, and blew a kazoo. We blew our kazoos back at her from our seats in the audience.

Today is my mom's fiftieth birthday. To look at her, you'd never know it. (I used to think she looked like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.) But if you look at all the things she's done in her life, you'd swear she'd have to be at least 114 to fit all that living into one lifetime. For the last ten years, she's been telling us she's going to see the Statue of Liberty before she turned fifty. Well, she'll be a few days late, but next week she's going to New York City for the first time, off on another adventure, still ready to try and learn and see new things. Even now, she's still teaching me how to live, how to love, how to be a good person, and how to know when it's okay to pop a bully in the nose. See, I told you she was the best.

Happy Birthday, Mom. We're all lucky to have you.