Hi everyone, this post may be melancholy. I won’t be upset if you skip this and read something more hilarious, like “Ask a Nonprofit Director: Advice on Love, Family, and Other Stuff.” Or these nonprofit cocktail recipes.
Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday, and I will wake up to realize that my mother has been gone for ten years. She died at the age of 49. When you’ve lost someone, holidays can be terrible to endure. The first few Mother’s Days I just stayed in bed most of the morning, envious of all those happy people taking their moms to brunch.
Now I am older, so I try to figure out what this all means, what I can learn from all this. I run through memories I have. Since it was one of the last moments I had with her, I recall coming home from college, and being greeted by the smell of her cooking. Sweet and sour soup, tofu sautéed in tomatoes, braised bamboo shoots—dishes she had learned to make when I told her I had decided to go vegan.
My mother stood there at the sink washing dishes, smiling. The late-afternoon sunlight streaming through our kitchen window fell on her hair, and she’d greet me with these sweet maternal words:
“You’re too skinny. You look like one of those zombies on TV.”
I’d hug her, which would confuse my mom, since we don’t hug much in Vietnamese culture. While I ate, she would sit down next to me, smiling and staring. “Finish this food,” she said, “tomorrow I’m going to make you stuffed cabbage. No one is going to marry you when you look like this.”
She’d look unusually content just sitting there watching me, and I’d try to enjoy it, for later on she would lose her temper and yell about how messy the house was, or how lazy we kids were, never doing our chores without being asked. On occasion, she would tell me that it was not too late to give up this nonprofit nonsense and go to medical school.
It has been ten years, and I have forgotten so many things. Her laughter, the sound of her singing while she’s cleaning, the way she cracked roasted watermelon seeds or popped bubble wrap while watching Chinese soap operas. The cadence of her footsteps as she walked up the stairs with boxes of soap and paper towels she’d bought from Costco.
Some of the memories are painful, like the arguments we had, followed by the years of silence. I had become a bitter teenager, resentful at being forced to help out after-school at the convenience store my parents bought and ran. During my high-school years we exchanged ten words per day. My parents worked all the time, fifteen hours daily, and we had dinner together as a family maybe twice a year. My mother picked us kids up from school, and I would stonewall her every attempt to make conversation until silence was our default. I remember on one of these awkward, lonely drives she suddenly said, with a sigh, “Linda’s dog lost three pounds.” My sister had left her Tamagotchi pet, popular at the time, with our mom to take care of while she was at school, where they had been banned. The combination of my mother grasping at something to say and the fact that she was so concerned about a digital puppy even as she worked her long hours, was both comical and deeply sad. I said nothing in reply, and we both stared at the road.
The day I left for college, we still didn’t exchange any words. I knew she never wanted me to leave home, and the acceptance letter from my school in St. Louis broke her heart. I had loaded up the taxi with my luggage, and she nodded at me and went inside the house. There was nothing that felt right to say. There was no hug goodbye. I was about to take off when something stopped me. I went back in and found my mother standing in her room, her face in her hands, crying. I hugged her. She buried her face in my shoulder. We said nothing. I left.
I’m glad that at the end, we had rebuilt our relationship, and my final memories of her are happy ones. But still, there are so many things I would change. Last month, I went back to the house in West Seattle to visit my father, and the sight of the pile of firewood in the backyard triggered memories of my mother loading up the wheelbarrow in the snow and pushing the wood to our front porch so we could burn it in the fireplace. And it reminded me of what a self-centered, thoughtless person I had been. Sometimes she would ask me to do some chore, and I would come up with ways to get out of it. My mother had given up everything, and pedaled for miles on her bicycle in the cold of our village, carrying heavy loads of grains to sell at the market to feed our family, and in the US she would wash dishes at restaurants and deliver newspapers for The Seattle Times and sew backpacks late into the night. And there I was, pretending to be asleep when she came into my room to ask me to bring in the firewood. I wish I could go back in time and run after her and say, “Mom, go inside. It’s cold. I’ll get the firewood.” If I could go back in time, I would get all the firewood, every day. I would talk to her. About everything. About nothing. I would take her to brunch once a while, even when it’s not Mother’s Day.
What is the point of all this? We in the nonprofit field are so busy because the work is pressing and people’s lives depend on our actions. In response, most of us have unconsciously adopted the mindset that we are indispensable, that things will collapse if we’re not around. The Indispensability Myth is an important one, since it drives us all to do good work. But it is also dangerous. We work long hours in the evenings and weekends, hours that should be spent with people we love. We don’t take enough family leave. Out of guilt, some of us stay in positions or organizations longer than we want to. We lose touch with our friends. We watch our kids grow older, our parents frailer, and we wonder where the years went. Sometimes we work so much that we ignore the people around us, assuming that they will always be around. And sometimes it is too late.
A colleague and mentor of mine called me up once for personal advice. Her mother was showing signs of health problems. “Should I take a break from work and move down to take care of her?” she asked. I thought of the importance of my friend’s work, and her integrity in always getting things done. And then I thought of my mother and the things I wish I had done, the words I could have said, the time I could have spent. And it struck me as indicative of our field, and of our professionals’ dedication, that my friend even had to think about this decision.
If someone had told me that I would lose my mother one day, that all the memories of her I had created up to then would have to last me the rest of my life, I would have tried to create more, to create better ones, and to grasp them more firmly. I have accepted the fact that these are all the memories of her I will ever have, and I walk with them as if I were cradling apples in my arms, careful so that they don’t slip through. But so many have, and more will. Anyone who knows loss knows that you don’t lose someone just once, but multiple times; first the piercing pain when you realize that they are gone, and then moments of wistful sadness over the years as you realize your memories of them are fading. Sometimes I wish I could walk up to the house and open the door and for just one more moment be greeted by the smell of my mother’s cooking.
“Yes,” I said, “spend time with your mom. You won’t regret it.”
We all need to temper the burden of unconsciously believing we are indispensable. We are not indispensable, and it is OK. It should be freeing. If we are not around, chances are, our organization will continue on without us. Other people will continue to do the work. Sadly, the problems we are trying to address will likely still be there way after we’re gone. So it’s OK to take a break once a while if you can. Go on vacation with your family. If a loved one is sick, take time off to take care of them. And if you’ve been thinking about leaving your job for a while now but are feeling guilty about it, let it go, and move on. If you just became a parent, extend your leave so you can spend time with your new baby. Projects come and go, I was reminded by a colleague, but your kids only grow up one time. Life is too short to neglect the people around us, even for our world-changing missions. Our community would be better served if all of us take more time for the people we love. It is they who are indispensable, and we need to realize this before they’re gone.
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