Lesson #5: Don't Be Afraid to Try Things

When I was ten or eleven one of my older sisters came to live with us. She'd spent a lot of time in Mexico and had learned to cook authentic Mexican food. The first time she cooked for the family and I came to the table I asked, "What's this junk?" Probably not the best approach, but I'd always been a little picky with my food, meat in particular, and was not impressed with the smells wafting up from beneath my nose. It was kind of soupy, with vegetables and pork and there weren't any spoons. We were supposed to eat it with homemade corn tortillas we tore into triangles and used like spoons.

After being chastised for my rudeness, Mom enforced the "one bite" rule. I had to try it and if I couldn't choke it down I could have something else. I was determined I wasn't going to like it, but I gave it a chance and took my single bite. And another. And more and more until I was done and asking for seconds.

Mom put the "one bite" policy into practice in other areas of her life as well. It was a matter of you never know what you can do until you try. I can't begin to tell you how many walls we painted, how many times Mom fixed her own plumbing by calling people in the know or getting a book and figuring it out, or how often we tore down walls and built them up again. She laid her own carpet, tried to break my horse (and broke a collarbone in the process), wrote family history books, and improvised anything and everything that needed a fix.

At the age of seventy she took it upon herself to build a shed and a deck on the back of our house. When I offered to help her (because I love building stuff too), she turned me down. She wanted to do it herself and I have been very impressed by the quality of her work. Had she ever built a deck or a shed before? No. She just figured it out and did it.

I have always loved that quality in her. She was not only capable, but teachable, and took pride in the work she did. I love to go sit on my deck or stand in my yard and look at the wood and know she created something with her own hands. She wasn't afraid to try new things, and it's a quality I try very hard to incorporate into my own life. Thanks, Mom, for teaching me to find ways to do whatever needs doing.

"There's always a way to learn about what needs doing. You've just got to be brave enough to try."

Lesson #4: Trust in the Lord

I used to think Mom had a direct line to God. I can't begin to list the number of times she came up with what appeared to be a random answer that was the perfect fix to my problem. Whenever I had a challenge her first question for me was, "Have you prayed about it?" More often than not the answer was "no," but you'd better believe her reminder made the difference.

I asked her once when I was a young teenager, "How do you know if the answer you are getting is coming from Heavenly Father or if it's just coming from inside yourself? How can I know it's the spirit talking to me and not just what I want?" She taught me a beautiful lesson on prayer then, one that I continue to use and will for the remainder of my life.

She said, "Make your decision prayerfully, then once you've decided what you feel is best for the situation, kneel back down and tell the Lord what you've decided. Say, 'If this is wrong, no matter how bad I want it, please close the door, but if it's right, please open a window and let it come to pass.'" It takes the worry out of decisions for me. It lets me make the decision with his guidance, but then allows me to put it back in His hands so that His will can be done.

The biggest challenge for me has always been trusting Him to let it happen-or not-once the decision has been made, but Mom's faith taught me that lesson too. You just have to keep moving forward and trust that, as Mom used to say, "The Lord won't drop you down a big, black hole. He may let you get awfully close to the edge at times, might even let you lean out over that hole, but he's got a safety harness on you. You've just got to trust Him."

The scripture on this lesson is one I've heard a million times over my life, but stands as a great reminder to me on a daily basis:

"Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths."

Lesson #3: Love the Earth

Saturday was chore day in my family, and chores usually included something that got us outside for several hours at a time. Mom was a huge gardener coming from a long line of farmers. The smell of fresh turned earth was like chocolate to her. Every spring she would be outside doing something as soon as the snow had melted enough for those little shoots to come bursting through the soil.

Everywhere we lived Mom had a garden, and we're not talking a little fifteen by twenty foot plot of land. That was about all the space she could afford in our small California yard, but in Washington, where we had vast fields to roam, we had a plot as big as our house devoted to her vegetables and we still went and gleaned the fields of asparagus after the workers were done. In Oklahoma she had to learn how to garden all over again as the combination of heat and clay baked our tomatoes and made it nearly impossible to get carrots out of the ground, and yet despite that, we had not one garden, but two. One for all the above ground vegetables and another field just for varieties of potato. In Bountiful, Utah she moved the fence line for the garden up so that a quarter of our half acre plot was taken up by her beloved garden. Until then the entire fence had been covered by gorgous flowers. It broke my heart when Mom began uprooting them but when I complained her answer was, "we can't eat the flowers."

The last six years of Mom's life she lived with my family and we knew from the beginning to plan for a large garden. We were blessed to get one of the biggest plots of land in our neighborhood and Mom devoted probably a third of our back yard to gardening. Even when her knees hurt so bad they would bring her to tears, she would put on her knee brace and go out to rototill. I told her to wait and let me do that for her, to save her energy for the things I didn't know how to do. She would nod her head and say okay, and then as soon as I left to run errands she'd get out the rototiller and do it herself. It was her passion.

She once told me that she felt about gardening the way I felt about writing books, and that was when I finally understood and gave her the freedom to follow her heart. I let her play in the dirt to her heart's content and she couldn't have been happier, despite the limitations her body tried to place on her.

As a result of her example, I not only plant gardens wherever I live, I have learned to love and appreciate our beautiful earth in all its glory. Mom and I admired many a sunset together and have often pulled off the road during a trip just to admire some little bit of art God created in his mountains or sandstone cliffs.

"The Lord must be the greatest artist of all, creating this world for us. We owe it to Him to use it and treat it with respect."

Lesson #2: Don't Judge

Mom always used to say she admired the way I would reach out to "the underdog", but she never realized I learned that lesson watching her.

When I was young there was a sister in our ward who sought Mom's counsel on a regular basis for the emotional difficulties she was facing. I was obviously never privy to those meetings, but I do know how busy Mom was. A widow trying to raise two very active kids on her own while helping her ailing parents is never an easy task, yet somehow she always found time to help this sister, to just be there for her and listen.

She never had many close friends and yet she seemed to be a friend to everyone. She always reached out to the hearbroken, brought meals to the sick and elderly, gave extra time and attention to the misfit teenagers, and never showed impatience with those who had speech impediments.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me that beauty lies within the person, not without.

"You never know what's inside somebody until you open them up and take a look."

In Honor of Mother's Day

This Mother's Day is a tough one for me. I can't buy a gift for my mom. I can buy flowers, but she'll never see them. She can't read a card or a poem I write for her. So, I decided the best way I can honor my mother this year is by sharing the lessons I have learned through her example and words of wisdom, and if any of my fellow bloggers decided to follow suit, I'll post links on my sidebar. After all, isn't a mother's greatest job that of teacher? And so, without any further ado, I give you day one of 25 lessons learned from Mom.

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Lesson #1: "You can do anything if you want it bad enough."

Mom believed in me. From the first I can remember she always encouraged me to try new things, to spread my wings and see what I was capable of. When I said, "I can't", she always said, "Yes you can. I have confidence in you." That was a lesson learned from her grandmother. Grandma Rainy wrote that she always tried to make her children see she had confidence in them, that it was the greatest gift she could give them.

When I told Mom I wanted to write a book, she said "great! I bet you'll be good at it. You're so gifted with words." When I told her I wanted to build a den, she said, "wow, that's an ambitious project, but you're so capable I know it will turn out beautiful." When I told her I wanted to adopt the children we were fostering, despite their challenges, she said, "You'll make a wonderful Mom. I know you can do this." Whenever I dealt with any kind of challenge, whether it was facing a friend I had hurt or trying to accomplish an overwhelming task, she was there cheering me on.

When Mom took her last breath, my first selfish thought was, she's never going to see me published. Immediately after a wave of peace flowed through me and I realized something: she didn't have to. She knew, with absolute certainty, that my time was coming. In her eyes I was already there. She gave me the confidence to spread my wings and try and it is a lesson I want to pass on to my own children.

"You can do anything if you want to do it bad enough. I have confidence in you."

Back to the Book

I'm heading out of the house to get some writing done today. I don't know why, but it's always easier for me to write in a public place. Probably less distractions pulling me away from the writing, you know, things like . . . oh, laundry, dishes, that sort of thing. I'll report in later on how much I got done. I'm hoping for two to four thousand words today, so I'd better get started!

Sure do wish there was a Barnes and Noble or cafe around here . . . .

Quote of the day: "I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop."

Clarence Budington Kelland

Sundays

I'm posting at the LDS Writers Blogck today. If you're going through withdrawals, go read my stuff over there! :D