Lessons from mom

When I was a kid, my mother was a treasure-trove of folksy sayings. When I failed to make the varsity basketball team, she told me to “stop crying over spilled milk. When I was chomping at the bit for Christmas morning, she told me to “hold my horses.”

Some of her sayings and colloquialisms came from the rural area we lived in. Some came from her Amish childhood. They all were rooted in common sense, love, and kindness.

Before she left for work in the morning, she would tell me to “red up your room” when I got home from school. Of course, this meant to clean and tidy my room.

When I worried about getting a good grade on a math exam, she told me “to relax and use the brain God gave me.” I looked at her perplexed and said that relaxing and using my brain were at the extreme end of the spectrums. She was ready with a response. She told me that I was making things too hard on myself. I needed to study hard and forget everything else.

The sayings were too many to count.

• She had lots of sayings focused on hard work: “The early bird gets the worm.” “Make hay while the sun shines.” “Any job worth doing is worth doing well.”
• When I was a young kid, learning about life and the rules of the world, she would come back with the classic, “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?” If I continued, she would ask, “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”
• If I got a scrape on my knee, she’d clean up the scrape and put a band-aid on it. She’d give me a quick hug and told me, “You’ll live.”
• When I was smart with her in the car, after track practice, she threatened me with, “Don’t make me turn this car around.” It didn’t matter that we were on our way home. Of course, I didn’t fight with semantics, I got her drift.
• If she felt my brothers or I were missing the bigger picture, she’d come back with an oldie, like “When I was your age . . .” The phrase carried extra special meaning. It meant that she was thinking back to when she was Amish and didn’t have all the things that we took for granted . . . like electricity or indoor plumbing.
• When I would buy her a present for Christmas or Mother’s Day, she would say, “Your presence is all I need.”

I heard other sayings too.

• “Shut the refrigerator door! What do you think, we’ve got all the money in the world?”
• “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
• “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
• “Life is like a bicycle. You’re going to fall, ya gotta get back up and keep pedaling.”
• “Life is what you make it.”

Of course one of her goodies was always, “One day you’ll thank me.” And oh, yea, I can’t thank her enough.

I write more about the lessons I learned from my mom in my post, A spoonful of honey, on the Heart of the Matter. I write about baking with my mom. As we worked the dough, she taught me that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

Check out my post.

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• My five biggest parenting mistakes