I love you, mom and dad

My dad is supposed to do another chemo treatment tomorrow, a treatment he was supposed to start last week but it was delayed because he had low platelets. That said, with my father’s health being as precarious as it’s been, I’ve been thinking a lot about both of my parents lately and about what they are going through with my dad’s heart condition and cancer.

Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about who my parents are and who I am because of them. Let me start by saying that I’m no different than any one. I’m normal and both my parents and I are human. Therefore, I am and they are, by that nature, imperfect. Thank goodness. Where would any of us be if we didn’t have our parents and the mis-doings we fault them for to blame some (or many) of our shortcomings on? Isn’t that part of being a kid?

But, fortunately, through luck, love, and/or the beauty of age, for more years than I can now count, blaming my parents for any of my defects has mostly become a thing of the past. It should be noted that I qualified the previous statement with the word “mostly” because I am smart enough to realize that for many of us there will always be things to work out from our childhood. And while in most cases our parents may not be to blame, I understand that because our parents are the people we are supposed to be able to trust the most, if something has run sideways from our past, in anyway, our parents inevitably become the primary fall guys. (What are parents for?)

But that’s not what this is about… I just want brag about my mom and dad a bit.

So, let me tell you about my dad. He’s the reason I became an artist and chose getting an art degree. When I was a little girl, with wonder and amazement, I’d watch my father as he sat at the dining-room table and painted. He worked in many mediums, but seeing the way he pushed water colors around, with his brushes, with some tissue, and with a cut-up cotton rag, dabbing the color out of a tiny puddle of blue and white just enough to mute all the color just right, making a sky you wanted to lay under as evening sets to night… Oh, how I couldn’t wait to grow up and paint my own pictures and let my imagination paint beyond even the horizons I could see.

When my father was younger, he played every sport, too. Well, it seemed that way. I have these memories of going to watch him play basketball, baseball, and volleyball (volleyball he played with my mom). He was even the coach of my and my sister Lynn’s T-ball team. (Of course, I’m the only one who remembers the fat kid who sat down and peed on 3rd base.)

What I also haven’t forgotten is what my dad told me when I was 17 years old. We were on our way to an audition for a summer school program for the arts. 500 hundred students were to be chosen out of a pool of 5,000 applicants, 100 students in each discipline: drama, visual arts (drawing and painting), dance, video, and singing. I’d already missed out on a visual arts grant from my high school earlier that year and had chosen another dream-de-teenage-dejour to pursue: drama. My dad knew how racked my nerves were, and as we pulled up, he said, “You know, I’m jealous already.”

I couldn’t imagine how my dad could be jealous of me, as I already thought I was going to fail, and, befuddled, I asked, “Why?” My dad said, “Because, whether you make it or not, just for trying you already have more courage then I ever had at your age.” To this day I think my dad telling me I was strong is the reason I got into the program. He gave me the confidence to just be, just try.

A couple of years later, after I’d moved out of the house to try out my own wings (I moved out 2 weeks after I graduated high school), my dad said, “I admire you. So far you’ve lived your life not wondering what’s behind door number three. You’ve been opening every door.”

I don’t think my dad has realized that with his words he gave me the courage to continue to open the doors in life I have been afraid to go near. What he’s said has been my motto when I have the most fear. “Just open the damn door, Levan. It’s just a door. If it’s the wrong one it’ll lead you to the right one,” I’ve been telling myself.

My dad helped me with my ability to be the person I keep trying to become even when I don’t always feel like I am there yet. But, I live my life trying to open door number three and trying to have the courage to continue to audition for the best life I can have.

It should be said, my daddy-doo can fix anything, from a toaster to a car engine. It took me a long time to figure out that a lot of men aren’t quite as handy. It took me even longer to realize a lot of men aren’t as creative as my father. They don’t all know how to play three different instruments, like the trumpet, a guitar, or the piano (which he taught himself in his 40s). Most men can’t carve a house out of a piece of wood or make a bird out of a pine cone, either. They don’t win mud-bogging races, or know how to jump a dune buggy off the edge of a razor-back sand dune. They don’t get a Harley fatboy in their late 50s or help out at a church pie night. Nor do they travel the United States with their best friend, their wife.

Let me tell you about my mom. She reads. Oh, does she. So much so that she can’t remember all the titles she’s gone through and she has to go to book exchanges and check the publication dates because then she knows if it’s recent she probably hasn’t already devoured the book. But, don’t expect my mother to go bragging about all the things she knows. That’s not her. No. She’ll just add to a conversation about something you can’t imagine anyone would know something about, and, whoola!, she does.

She can also cook. Oh, can she! It was one of the most memorable days in my life when her mom, my grandmother, told me that my potato salad might be better than my mom’s. See, if you’ve had my mother’s cooking, if you grew up with the kind of meals I grew up with, you’d think all mothers knew how to kill it in the kitchen like my mom. Not only can she make every kind of salad there is better than most, whatever it is people tell her, “This is the best...”

She’s also just as creative as my father. (Thanks, mom and dad, for giving me that artistic passion.) One of the ways my mother expresses herself is in the antique furniture she finds which no one else knows is a gem. Then, presto, she’s refinished the chair, the trunk, the table, the desk, the you-name-it, and it’s gorgeous.

It was my mother who gave me my first set of tools, you know. Yeah, mom doesn’t borrow dad’s drill. She’s got her own. She’s the one who gave me my drill for my 40th b-day.

It’s my mother’s wisdom which has been the tool she’s shared with me that I’ve profited the most from. She’s the one who said, “Every child may not agree with some of the choices their parents have made in raising them. However, there comes a point where you need to take responsibility for your life and not carry around the baggage of your past.” Well said, mom! I may not have all of my mother’s grace yet, and may never. But, if I am even the slightest glimmer from her light, I applaud the wisdom and the leading by example she’s given me that’s enlightened my way.

My mom is also the girl who has been married to my dad since she was 20 years old. My mom is the woman who, in a fleeting moment, admitted to me, when my sisters and I visited my dad before he started chemo, that she doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she loses my father. But, most of the time, when I ask my mom how she is doing, my mom is the kind of woman who says, “I don't want to talk about how I am doing because I refuse to feel sorry for my self.”

My mother is the one who taught me, that, as she’s always said, “things always work out.” Even with all the changes I’ve gone through, and all of the decisions I’ve made to try to re-arrange my life for the better, and even when I’ve started to doubt myself and haven’t wanted to tell my parents as much, so they don’t worry about me, my mom is the one who made me believe I’d get it all figured out again. “Don’t worry, mom,” I told her, as I was living in Colorado and waiting to hear if I’d get unemployment. Then she said, “I’m not worried about you, honey. You always land on your feet.” She made me believe, when I was doubting it myself, that, no matter what, I would be able to hold my shoulders up again.

I guess all that I am really trying to say is that I love my parents and I hope, with all that I have, that they get more time together, that I get more time with them, and that anyone who wants more time with anyone values the time they have now.

Here is to hoping my dad who knows how to kick ass kicks cancer's ass!