My Mother’s Generation

 By Angioline Loredo

When our parents were in their late 60s, my childhood friends and I used to compare notes on how they were living their sunset years.  We all agreed they were becoming more and more sensitive and hard-headed as the years went by, and how increasingly difficult it became coping with their needs as their physical and mental faculties started to decline.  We used to joke about the great irony in the role reversal – how we were “raising” our parents now – and laughed when everyone agreed, yes, we loved them with every fiber of our being, but Lord forgive us, sometimes their obstinacy could be just a bit nakagaraba (as one of us described it).

Some of my vivid memories as a child were the conversations among my mother and her teacher colleagues about their constant money problems.  Each had two or three children in college at the same time, their teacher’s salary could hardly cover the tuition and incidental expenses, and so everyone was in a state of permanent cash deficit.  Yet what struck me about them was the dignity and optimism with which they bore their burden.  They had an abiding faith that when the sun came up the next morning, God’s blessing would shine once again, and somehow money would be found to pay for the overdue tuition. I had not forgotten those conversations, and had since come to admire my mother’s generation – simple folks who worked hard to raise their kids, and as far as I knew, expected only that they grew up to be what they wanted to be.

Not a day passes that I do not think of my mother, and I will miss her for the rest of my life.  The fact of the matter is, in spite of our “complaints” about having to “raise” our parents, it is both a gift and a blessing to know, love, care, and honor them.

From a letter to a childhood friend on the occasion of the death of his mother