Why mom’s wisdom still resonates in adulthood

Isn’t it weird that the older you get, the more you miss your mom? Or maybe it’s just me.

She would’ve been 96 now and in the years before her death, the marbles were clicking wildly in her head. But she’s, to me, still just… mom.

I weirdly remember her not as a decrepit scarecrow not eating or talking, but the raven-haired beauty with the dark brown eyes that scared men – but not my dad.

He fell so hard for his “my hartjie, my liefie” that her uppity parents – they are, after all, the Mulders of Muldersdrift – got a letter saying unless he marries her now, his little brain (thank you, Trovato) will win his big brain battle and there’ll be a child.

Out of wedlock, of course. So, she scandalously married the miner who was “beneath her”.

But that’s her history and choices – which I think she may just, in her later years, have regretted. Not that she ever let on.

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She was never a cup of tea but I got the best of her, always. And I didn’t realise what life lessons she flippantly taught me.

I’m not only talking darts and flat pleats. When Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s book He’s Just Not That Into You saw the light in 2009, it was old news for me because she told arrogant teenager me when the boy who took me to the movies didn’t call and I had the phone in my hand: “Don’t throw yourself at him. If he likes you, he’ll come.”

She faltered; she fell; she was wrong sometimes. But I never told her so.

Just like she never “I told you so” when I chose a fisty-fit man and she warned me.

But maybe her biggest life lesson was – and she said this umpteenth times despite, or maybe because, she was of the ’50s repressed vaginas – “never talk religion or politics”.

But hell, Mom, it’s hard not to.

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Doesn’t religion shape the politics?

Isn’t about every war caused by religion?

I watch a YouTube snippet where an Israeli Arian-like calls Palestinians “dogs; we’re the chosen…”

I read the despair of one Palestinian on X: “You know what’s insane is how the Western public consciousness would mobilise if this was 2.2 million golden retrievers being bombed to extinction in an inescapable cage.”

And I wonder.

But my mom rises like Jesus and whispers in my ear: “Love, my child.

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“They need to love their neighbours like themselves.”