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mother. She wasn’t interested in just rocking this boat. She intended to capsize it.
The ones to worry about are the ones who cloak their discrimination behind some other excuse so you can’t call them out.”
Come the fall, I would be leaving for college and my mother would lose her little boy, and I would lose the person who had always been there for me, my fiercest advocate since the day I’d been born.
My father knew the depth of my relationship to my mother, and he didn’t begrudge us a moment of it. My relationship with him was different. He’d raised me to be a man, and he was proud of me. But to my mother—I suspect to all mothers—their little boys will always be their little boys, no matter how old those boys become.
“Come close,” she said. “I want to see the eyes that looked up at me the moment you were born.”
My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history—Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Nixon’s resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake—we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word.
We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary.
