Lessons from my Mother
After her funeral yesterday, my family spent this morning sitting around telling stories about my mom. She was an award-winning poet, an expert quilter and a woman of faith who, though humble to a fault, was smart, talented and incredibly generous to everyone she met. I told my family a story that they’d never heard, and I’ve rarely told anyone while she was alive, but I think it’s worth telling.
Patricia Christine Cole was born in 1949, an early Baby Boomer. She grew up Southern Baptist, her mother from Texas, her father out of the picture early, first from divorce, then suicide. She was raised in a loving but conservative blended family, dropped out of college after being the victim of an assault, and became something of a flower child. She believed in the civil rights movement, hated the Vietnam War, and was a life-long democrat. As a kid she put me to work helping deliver Meals on Wheels to housebound people in Chicago.
When I was a teen she went back to college, took a poetry class from Ursula K. Le Guin, and graduated with majors in women’s studies and creative writing and minors in psychology and english literature. She raised me to be a feminist and made certain that I understood how structural inequality works. I’ve grown up to be a charitable person who does his best to stand up for people who need it, and a lot of that is down to my mother.
She was extraordinary.
She was also a little scatter-brained. She rarely got the names of anyone in the family right on the first try. When she called your name, you knew to wait to see if she really meant somebody else. When trying to compliment a relative, she called her “a jewel in the buff.” For her next birthday, I made her a card with a drawing of a gem with arms and legs strolling down the beach in high heels waving a bikini top in the air.
My mom died of vascular dementia on February 4, 2025, and the last few years have been hard, particularly for my father. I’ll spare us both the awful details, but suffice to say that for the last year she wasn’t the sweet, gentle soul that any of us knew, and talking to her could be heartbreaking.
A few years ago we were visiting my folks in Wisconsin and spent a day with her exploring Racine, home of the kringle. She had just read a book about a woman’s struggles under oppression of the patriarchal fundamentalists of Iran, and was trying to explain to me just how bad it was for women there. She surprised me by insisting that all Persians hate women.
I was taken aback. My own mother saying something like that? I was shocked.
But I was still the son she raised me to be.
So I told her off. I said that generalizations like that are racist. Unlike her, I’d had friends from Iran during my time in the military, and knew just how diverse Iranian culture can be, no matter what she’d read. She was not happy. We argued a bit, but I didn’t back down. She clammed up and didn’t speak to me for half an hour, chatting with my son instead.
And then she apologized. She said that I was right and she was wrong. She realized that her words were racist and had spent that half hour thinking about it. That’s not an easy thing for anyone, and certainly not for an aging Boomer, let alone a mother having to admit to taking a hard lesson from her son.
My mom really was extraordinary, and not just in her accomplishments and successes, but in her humility, honesty and decency. I turned 50 last year and I worry that as times and attitudes change and right-thinking people seek to elevate the lives of all people, even those very unlike me, I’ll make mistakes. But if my mom could have the strength to admit to a mistake even to a snot-nose kid like me, I hope that I do a fraction as well.
