See the Spirit Inside

My mother grew up on a farm.  I would say she was a farm girl, but nothing could be further from the truth.  She hated chickens, was afraid of cows, avoided horses, and had no time for pigs.  She could not get a hen to give up eggs without getting her arms pecked. When she was pregnant with my sister, she ran from a cow all the way up a long hill.  Mother was a city girl in hiding.  

But it’s like that with people.  We look around at where they are and decide we know them.  We don’t. Worse than that, we judge ourselves the same way.    

“I’m just an old redneck.”

“I’m a small town boy.”

“I’m from the wrong side of the tracks.”

That says zero about you or anyone.  I have seen children pigeon-holed for life by their home addresses in elementary school.

Mother liked dresses.  She wore pants only when the snow nearly covered her head, and then, only outside.  She hurdled barbed wire fences for fun and was the pitcher of a girls’ softball team.  She played the piano by ear from at least four years old. She was mathematical, political, and driven.  She was once asked to be a slated candidate for the Indiana State House of Representatives, but turned it down because she didn’t want to narrow her life down to one thing.    

Because she was my mother, whom I knew after she had been through the traumas of World War II and the Korean War, I did not see her as a person until I had a granddaughter who has a lot of her spirit. Annaliese loves swimming and is a dead-aim archer.  She, too, is smart, funny, and creative. And, like mother, she prefers dresses. Annaliese doesn’t just wear a dress, she owns it. I can see now that it is an inherited talent. Shortly after Mother passed away, my daughter, Heather, met a woman who had known mother.  When the woman realized she was mother’s granddaughter, she began to cry and managed only to get out, “her little dresses.”

As she tried to comfort the woman, Heather said, “I had a mini identity crisis where I thought, ‘Wait, I’m the granddaughter.’”          

We are spiritual beings in human bodies.  Lose the spirit, the body dies. We know this, and yet the man in the ascot tie impresses us more than the man in overalls.  And we always think we know someone by their address, their job, or their outfit. I wish I had looked at people differently in the past.  The memories of them haunt me; the questions I should have asked are lost. I hope that I have learned to value listening, to see the spirit inside.  

No one should be plagued with an unfair title.  I know that people sometimes avoid their family gatherings because they once got lost and, now, they are greeted with being the ‘long lost” member of the family.  Nothing they have ever accomplished seems to matter. I hope I can look at everyone with fresh eyes, though I know that’s a tall order. But, like so many things, I should be able to improve at it since I first learned it from my mother.