Cold Brew Chronicles: Number Five

In June, I started Cold Brew Chronicles with one promise: the consistency of release would be sporadic at best and potentially singular at worst, depending of course on how you liked the first post. I’ve started Number Five a number of times over the last few months and each time have left them on Medium as drafts.

However, something happened recently that I thought was an interesting moment and illustrative of many of the things that I have thought a lot about over the past year.

There is a scene in the movie “The Social Network” where Mark Zuckerberg has fallen asleep at a desk in one of Harvard’s computer science labs. One of his classmates bursts in (“classmate” because he only had one friend, Eduardo, who would end up suing him for millions after Zuckerberg cut him out of the fledgling, billion-dollar company). Upon his arrival, the classmate wants to know if a girl in one of Mark’s classes is single. This interaction gives Mark the idea to add “Relationship Status” to Facebook’s interface. To me, this signifies a defining feature of our 21st century internet — the ability to tell important characteristics about a person just by glancing at their profile page.

With one man’s mind, social media would come to fundamentally change the way we find romantic partners, figure out where that kid in our Econ class is from, gut-check the persona of someone we’ve only met once, and much more.

I tell this story not because I have been thinking about Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook for the past year. I tell this story because it reminded me, on that recent evening, of what happened much earlier in that day. I was going through a number of my mother’s old things, something I do probably once a year. Typically, the things I find are ones that I have seen before. This time, however, I found what would end up being the last birthday card my mother would ever give to me.

How did you ever get to be 6? You bring us so much joy and laughter. I love you very much.

xoxoxo

Mom

For each of us, there are moments in our lives that redefine the way we think, the way that we interact with other people, and the dreams we hold in the innermost ventricles of our hearts — and often, these moments sneak up on us.

For Mark Zuckerberg, the “Relationship Status” idea that afternoon in Cambridge would change how he thought about the potential of his social network, and by extension, how we all organize ourselves, learn about each other, and interact in the modern age.

Unbeknownst to me, that morning in April of 2007, when I had been sent to see which family members wanted oatmeal and found my mom “asleep,” would radically impact me and radically shape the way the way that I form relationships with others. That is what I have been thinking about.

I grew up thinking that at some point, inevitably, I would just kind of stop thinking about my mom — that time would pass in such a way that my six year old brain would no longer impact my twenty-one year old brain. Of course, if I was a student of psychology or neuroscience, I would know that is just not how the brain works and is not how trauma leaves its mark. Early childhood trauma has long-term effects on children.

In the last year, I have learned a lot about my mom, more than probably any year since she died, the preceding years of which I was but a very, very young lad.

My family has never been shy about talking about my mom, but I see an opportunity to talk about how her memory might live on and how it may in fact help us think about some of the things we encounter today.

My mom struggled quite a bit growing up, but she was surrounded by love and friendship that helped her through. She had a rare disease called Ehler’s Danlos. She would not be diagnosed until later in life, but the disease had early impacts on her mobility and her day-to-day routine. Frequent dislocations, chronic pain, and joint surgeries were defining moments in her childhood and adolescent years.

This past Christmas, I was told a story about how at her high school, groups of students would help carry her down the steps, in between classes, to lunch, for dismissal, or wherever she may have needed to go. I had never known the degree to which her mobility was impacted and would continue to be until she died in 2007.

These experiences had inevitable impacts on her mental health as she battled anxiety and depression at varying degrees throughout her life.

Yet, the story of my mother’s time on this earth is not sad, to me at least. It is not a story of being beaten down and struggling to stand back up. Rather, her story is one of sheer optimism, faith, a faith I have admittedly struggled with, and a belief in doing right by those around you.

In junior high, she would earn a trophy in the Optimist Oratory contest with a speech that began with a quote from Bobby Kennedy.

“Some people see things as they are and ask why. I see things as they could be and ask why not.”

My mom would go on to become a Catholic educator, administrator and principal, mother to three, long-time wife to my dad, and a pillar of every community she was a part of. And along the way, she pulled a sleigh of optimism and empathy behind her.

Cards from her time as a principal demonstrate the affection her staff had for her, especially on Boss Day, a holiday I had never heard of. Small notes from her graduating middle schoolers in 2003 thanked her for always looking out for and for always believing in them, even, as they note, when no one else did. Those same middle schoolers have gone on to be police officers, college football and basketball players, and more. They carry a piece of my mother with them, and I hope that their families in Pine Lawn and Northwoods do too.

My mother’s story is the one of the audacity of hope, a reference of course to the title of Barack Obama’s early memoir. However, her story is fully independent from any realm of politics or elevated rhetoric, is a stranger to the spotlight, and is humbly embodied in the 4 foot 11 inches body of a woman with curly brown hair, bright blue eyes, purple crutches, and a heart of pure love.

In a postcard to her grandmother while in college on a visit to London (I think), she expressed dreams of perhaps one day living in Europe. I am sure she had other dreams. At the end of her Optimism Oratory speech, she said, “Martin Luther King began one of his speeches by saying, ‘I have a dream.’ My hopes for this world are that together you and I can make today’s dreams tomorrow’s promises.”

These are fragments of the story of my mom. This is the story I have been wanting to tell, and this is the story that has consumed many of my thoughts for the past year as I seek to keep her memory alive in my own life and use it to shape how I think about what I want to do next. I imagine my mom writing me a birthday card for this upcoming year.

“How did you ever become 22?”

My hope is that she would see in me a similar magnitude of optimism that she had within herself. My dream is that my mother’s life is one that people remember, not just within the four walls of my family’s Christmas celebrations but in homes and amongst conversations elsewhere.

We are living in a time of universal crisis, and for some, any shred of optimism is perceived as naivete and devoid of having a firm hold on the reality of the world we live in.

There is a stubborn quality to optimism — to looking around, noticing all of the problems in the world, and thinking to yourself, we can all come together to do something about this.

Of course, there are some who are tired of being asked to stand up and fight, especially those with a generational history of ancestors fighting for the same issues they face today — Black, brown, indigenous peoples especially. And we must be attuned to that exhaustion, ready to uplift and support those who are hopeful for change now and respectful listeners of those who aren’t.

That is why looking around our communities, gauging capacity, and finding a way to move forward is important. Optimism is a practice in stubborn resiliency, in leveraging the privilege you might hold, and putting your best foot forward in whatever way you are able to and interested in pursuing.

I am not one who believes that people who have extremely tough lives are better off because of it or that they are given “only what they are able to handle.” My mother was given far too much for any one person. But, when those with abnormally difficult circumstances are able to find meaning, I think there is something there for all of us to learn.

I hope you have a stubborn optimism.

I hope on the tough days you are able to find the silver lining and still believe in making today’s dreams tomorrow’s promises.