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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I once had a grieving mother mistake me for her deceased son, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from a recent Facebook conversation.
How do you respond when the people or even the things in your life aren’t what you hoped they would be?
Today’s Fun Fact: Do you know what my favorite fruit is? For those of you who are long time listeners of this podcast, it will come as no surprise that my favorite fruit is pineapple! I love everything pineapple flavored and wish I could get my hands on pure pineapple juice by the gallon. Well today is…Pineapple Day!! From DaysoftheYear.com: Pineapples are a tropical fruit native to the America’s, first found being consumed by the Tupi people. Pineapples are actually herbaceous perennials, meaning they are leafy, not woody, plants that grow for more than two years.
These plants are so ambitious in their growth that if you cut the fruit off of one stalk, it grows multiple more stalk called ‘suckers’ to produce more fruit! More than one pineapple per plant, that’s amazing! Since their discovery pineapples have been transported all over the world, as one of their unique traits is that, once harvested, they tend to not continue to ripen. This gives them an amazing shelf life and lets them remain stored on a shelf for quite some time.
Pineapples are useful in so many things, from a stand-alone treat all on their own, to producing a very tasty fruit beverage full of vitamin C. If you’re the sort who likes a rich tropical beverage to cool you down on a hot day, then the Pineapple is half of the perfect solution, the Pina Colada… (And getting caught in the rain).
Pineapple Day is best celebrated by consuming this delicious fruit. You can have it in any number of ways, including freshly cut and eaten in slices. Or you can take it and use it to make an American favorite, the pineapple upside down cake, that’s a rich and delicious pineapple cake which you bake with slices of pineapple laid in the bottom of a pan along with a special sugary mixture that becomes the perfect topping when baked, then you turn the cake out of the pan onto a plate and voila! A wonderful cake topped with pineapple, who could ask for more! On Pineapple Day? No one.
What I Learned Yesterday
Well, it finally happened. I found my mom on Facebook. (If you don’t know why that’s a big deal, I encourage you to go listen to episode 7 of Stuff I Learned Yesterday and then come back and listen to this episode.) Every once in a while, maybe once or twice a year, I get the random urge to try and find my mom on Facebook. Every attempt so far has turned up no leads. I’ve even searched for her husband.
However, about 2 or 3 weeks ago I decided to search again. This time, I found a listing that looked like it could be a match. The person I found lives in Tennessee, just like my mom, but I wasn’t sure that the town was a match, mostly because I don’t know the name of the town my mom lives in. I know that it’s in the northwest corner of Tennessee and after a quick Google search, the city of the person of Facebook was in the northwest corner.
Could this be her? I looked at her pictures, but I still wasn’t sure. So then I checked out her friends list to see if I recognized anyone. I don’t recall ever meeting my mom’s siblings, but I do remember their names. Sure enough, there was a man that matched her brother’s name, and a woman that matched her sister’s name. Wow. This must be her.
I went back to her pictures and pulled up one that had the clearest image of her face. I must have stared at that picture for nearly 10 minutes trying to find someone I knew. I analyzed her eyes, smile, and cheekbones. The last time I saw my mom she was around 35 years old. She’s now 64. I looked at the picture again. Is this what my mom looks like aged nearly 30 years since the last time I saw her? I don’t know. I couldn’t say for sure.
The truth is that it is my mom. No matter how long I stare at that picture, I’m not going to reach a point where I recognize her. It’s been too long. The woman who’s image is in my head is a faded memory and only lives within those memories.
After finding her and checking out her profile for a bit I just sat there in my office, sort of dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to do. I was in a funk. I decided to go for a walk and took my son along. After a few minutes, I told him about my discovery.
He was excited! He’s never met her before. He’s asked me about her many times and I’ve told him all there is to tell about our relationship. He asked me if I sent her a friend request. When I told him that I had not sent her one and that I wasn’t sure if I would, he was confused. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to connect with my mom. It’s not that I don’t want to, I’m just not sure that I can. I’m not sure how I feel about her right now. Finding her has brought about confusion and my mind is foggy. He seemed to understand my hesitancy to reach out to her.
A week later while out golfing with my brother, I mentioned to him that I had found mom on Facebook. He was surprised. As it turned out, he also had looked for her several times before but had never been able to find her. My brother’s relationship is a bit different with her because while I haven’t seen her since I was about 12 years old, he actually lived with her for a while after he graduated high school. So he’s had a relationship with her since he’s been an adult. I have not. My brother and I are only 2 years apart, so it’s a point worth bringing up. However, he also has not had contact with her in quite some time.
Unlike me though, he didn’t hesitate to reach out. A few days later he sent me a text to let me know that he’d had a Facebook Messenger conversation with mom. It wasn’t very long and I won’t share all of it with you, but here’s how it ended.
Nate: What’s in the past is just that; the past. I reached out to you because I want a relationship with you. Life is getting short.
Mom: I don’t know. I will think about.
Nate: What did we do that was so bad.
Mom: You boys have turned me away time after time.
Nate: When did you reach out to us and we turn you away?
Mom: [no response]
Nate: Well I am reaching out to you now. I am getting married soon and I would like to to be there.
Mom: [no response, end of conversation]
I was really surprised by the conversation. There are some other things that were said that were even more baffling. I read the whole conversation to my wife and she just stood there with her mouth open. She could not understand how a mother could respond to the request of her own child seeking a relationship by simply saying, “I don’t know. I will think about it.”
Here’s what I learned.
I’m going state the obvious here and tell you that the relationship I have with my mom is not what I hoped it would be. I know some of you have relationships that are similar to my own. I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s tough sometimes. I mean, I thought I had this thing figured out. I thought I had made peace with it. I thought I was was over it. But seeing her picture, knowing where she is, seeing those words that she wrote- they opened up feelings and wounds that I thought were gone.
I’ve thought a lot about this over the last several days and it’s even kept me up at night. How does this new information change things? What does it mean? What happens now?
Honestly, nothing changes. It means nothing new. Nothing happens now. I still have no relationship with her. It still means I feel like she wants absolutely nothing to do with me and all the times she said she did were just lies. It still means that if she wants to have me and my family in her life, she has to make the first move and it’s going to be a long, slow, and careful process.
It makes me sad. I see the way my wife protects, loves, teaches, and fosters relationships with our kids and I can not understand the words and actions of my own mother. Why didn’t I get that kind of relationship with my mom?
So how do we respond when the people or even the things in your life are what you hoped they would be?
Let me tell you how I respond. I stop thinking about what I don’t have. I stop putting focus on the broken relationship that I have with my mom. I quit dwelling on what did not come to pass like I wanted. Instead, I focus on what I do have. Growing up I didn’t have a tangible relationship with my own mom. Instead, I had a relationship with my stepmom. While I certainly didn’t give her the proper respect she deserved or appreciate the effort she was making to love and care for me at the time, I realize it now. I am still connected with her, and while we rarely see each other in person since she is no longer married to my dad, we do stay connected online. I am grateful to have had her in my life during my childhood.
I’m also grateful for my grandma. She and my grandpa spent countless hours loving us, teaching us, guiding us, and helping us find the right path. They showed great patience, grace, and even discipline when necessary. My grandmother has had a very motherly influence in my life and I am deeply grateful for having her as such a close part of my life even to this day.
Lastly, I’m grateful for my mother-in-law. I know it’s fun to give mothers-in-law a bad time or paint them in a negative light, but I am blessed with a wonderful mother-in-law. She raised 3 very fun, respectful, and caring children of her own, one of which I get to call my wife. She’s a wonderful grandmother to my kids, is always supportive of Kari and I, and can make the most delicious meal you’ve ever had.
So that’s what I’ve learned. We all have things in our life that are not what we hoped they would be. Those things may be our job, financial status, health, place of residence, relationships, or countless other things. We do ourselves no good if we spend time thinking about what might have been or dwelling on what we don’t have. Instead, we should turn our focus on what we do have, no matter how big or small. When we focus on what we do have, we turn thoughts of regret into gratitude, sadness into joy, pain into comfort, and defeat into victory. It’s only then that I realize that I may have lost out on having a great relationship with my mom, but I have succeeded in having 3 other great women shape who I am today. Life is good after all!
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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