Origins Pt. I – My Mother the Dream Killer

One cannot get too far into writing a blog without throwing out a tribute to mother. As next week is my mother’s birthday, I thought this would be a good time for such a tribute. People have always said that I am a mama’s boy, and by people, I mean my mom used to always say that. She’s probably right. I tried being nice to my dad once, and he made me clean the loft.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has been a dream killer. Although she has on occasion killed me in my dreams, I am actually referring to her killing of my hopes, wishes, and aspirations. When I was a child, she told me that the chances of becoming a professional baseball player were slim, that the pink power ranger was too old for me, and that becoming a dinosaur was a physical impossibility.

My mother is also a liar. For example, whenever we passed by a train, she used to always say, “Look Steve, Dumbo’s on that train.” Imagine my disappointment as time and time again I somehow failed to see a cartoon baby elephant riding on the back of a train. To this day, I have very little trust in my eyes. Another time, I asked my mother what I should eat so that I could grow tall enough to grab the rim on the basketball hoop in our backyard. Her answer was, “vegetables.”

From my mother I learned that if you are a good boy, you gain your parents trust. And when your parents trust you, you get picked up from school two hours late every day.

When my mother finally did pick me up from school, she would engage in her favorite hobby…lecturing. You can pick just about any topic in the book, and she can lecture you on it for over an hour. Although we all got to hear all of the lectures in her arsenal, she definitely had her go to lectures for each child. Her favorites for me were “don’t put all your eggs in one basket;” “I don’t know why you like this music…I’ll yell at you and you don’t have to pay me;” and my personal favorite, “don’t be like your sister.”

The lecture that had the biggest impact on me growing up, however, was my mother’s testimony. Oftentimes, she would list to me all of the blessings we have as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Even if somebody could somehow prove to me that Mormonism isn’t true, I would still attend church because it makes us better people,” she would then tell me. I learned through my own experience that the church is true, and these blessings are just icing on the cake.

So, I suppose my own testimony is strong today because my mother taught me how to have faith and how to recognize blessings in my life. She may have killed a few dreams along the way, but she also opened up a whole new landscape of dreams by helping me gain a testimony. I guess what I’m trying to say is…my mom’s alright.