Karolinka In & Around Bulgaria

Once again, today is Mother’s Day and I didn’t buy my MoM* flowers, make her breakfast in bed, send her a card or do anything else that children are encouraged to do on this day in the States. I have to hope that a blog post will suffice.

MoM, last year I wrote you a letter. This year I’m writing you a list.

At top 10 list.

That’s almost like flowers and breakfast in bed, right?

So without further ado, the top 10 reasons I’m inspired by you, MoM:

1. You’ve always been interested in and adopted new technology. I think it’s really cool that you bought your first computer when I was in second grade (1987-ish) and now I’m 30. Even cooler? I like that you haven’t succumb to facebook but that we talk on skype almost every weekend.
2. You are quick to laugh. Even at dAd’s jokes no matter how bad they are. I learned how to laugh from your model.
3. You always make your expectations clear. For example, you told me once when I was fairly small and hiding under my bunk-bed because I didn’t want to go to the dentist that there were a few things that I had to do in life: go to the doctor’s, the dentist’s and graduate from high school. This seemed clear enough to me and even today I appreciate how straight forward you’ve always been.
4. You have a vision of what you want from your life and you work to make this vision come true. From buying a house that needs some serious fixing up and remodeling said house to imagining a garden in our backyard and growing all of the flowers from seeds to starting your own business with dAd and later going backing to teaching. You make daring things happen.
5. I’ve never heard you and dAd fight or yell at each other. Growing up, I had no idea that adults fight, yell or scream at each other. It’s only now as an adult that I have any idea how lucky I was to live in a house where the adults in my life talked to each other to solve their problems or disagreements. Thank-you.
6. You have 20-something friends as well at 80-something friends. I hope that one day I too will have a wide variety of friends and maybe just maybe I’ll take up your tradition of 5th-Friday pot lucks too.
7. You like to figure out how things work. If something is broken you want to figure out how to fix it yourself. If something doesn’t work the way you think it should, you research it. If you see something you’d like to know more about you ask questions and seek out people who know what you want to know. This is a really incredible habit of mind. I suspect this is part of the reason you are a scientist. I don’t see the world in the same way but your habit of mind has encouraged me to ask questions. Lots of them. And to value the knowledge other people posses.
8. You don’t make disparaging remarks about your body. In a culture obsessed with bodies and being skinny this is an impressive feat.  You’ve always made it clear that health is important but at the same time you never linked self-worth to body size.
9.  More over, you don’t wear make-up or have your ears pierced. This is clearly a choice that you actively made and continue to make and I respect that. In my own life, I’ve made the choice to pierce my ears and wear make-up but I like that you challenged me on each of these choices making me think about the act and that you made me wait until I could take responsibility for them. I can only imagine that you must have died a little bit inside when in third grade I started begging to get my ears pierced as well as at the end of middle school when I pleaded to be allowed to buy make-up and wear it and for this all I can say is thank-you. Thank-you for letting me be my own person.
10. You are always willing to help people to support the dreams of others. I think it’s amazing that you let N. and K. live at your house while they were saving money to buy a house. That you drove to Tacoma on your spring break to help C. move to a new apartment. That you helped and still help dAd with the Antique store. That you babysit for A. so that she can work at her winery. That you encourage D. to pursue his various interests. That you let me keep all sorts of things at home in my childhood bedroom so that I can live abroad.
11. You love read and you make time in your life to read. I learned to love to read from you. You took me to the library. You opened the world up to me and encouraged me to imagine the world in new ways reading aloud novels like: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Secret Garden, and The Wizard of Oz.  You let me order Scholastic books each month when I was in elementary school–namely all 19 Boxcar Children books.  And since I learned to read, I’ve never turned back.

So there you have it. The top 10 reasons I’m inspired by you, my mom. Okay, okay. If you’re counting along at home, you’ll have realized that this turned into 11 reasons. That’s because the reasons I am inspired by you cannot be contained in a top 10 list.

Love you, MoM!

*Ever wonder why I write MoM (and dAd)? Here’s the answer.