31 Days of Self Love - Day 28

Who are your role models and what qualities do you share with them? This isn't something that I've even thought about since I was a teenager, perhaps. Back then, my answer would have been fairly shallow. Back then, I'm sure I would have mentioned a singer that I was particularly into, and found some reason why she was worth trying to be like.

Now? I'd be crazy not to say that my mother is my role model.

My mother passed away a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday. Being a teenager, I guess I was fairly selfish. I mean, I was this nerdy homebody of a kid who rarely went anywhere (and even then, my idea of going somewhere as a teen was heading out to a movie with a friend who was cool enough to be driving already). I spent a good bit of time with my mother in her last few months, just hanging out with her in her room watching TV, or doing my homework in her room. But the thing is, and I didn't realize until it was too late, but I wasn't really spending any quality time. It wasn't until I was a bit older that there were so many questions I should ask, so many conversations that adult me would never get to have with her mother - a little foresight if I ever have a daughter - so there are a lot of things that I never got to know or learn about her.

Into my adulthood, though, I am realizing that I managed to capture a bit of my mother in my life. She was kind, and generous, and I guess I never really thought about it as a kid, but she was regularly doing nice things for people - just because it was what you were supposed to do. I grew up not realizing that it wasn't normal to be the way she was, the way she seemed to put everyone else first. I find now that I do things like she would, and am always proud of myself when I catch myself doing something that I know she would have.

I'm usually the first one to offer to help someone, I'm the one making sure everyone has something to open on Christmas, I'm the one who stops to help when someone is on the side of the road with a blown-out tire. I feel like this tends to bother some people that I'm with, but I ignore them. I'm supposed to leave the world a little bit of a better place, because my mother proved that you can.