My mom is a trooper and I say that for two reasons. First, she is, in fact, a trooper, though not of the law enforcement variety as I will make clear in a moment. Second, calling someone a trooper is the highest compliment that you can get from my mom, so it is fitting that I give it to her.
A trooper, in my mom’s eyes, is someone who faces a great deal of adversity, but nonetheless soldiers forward and does so, importantly, without complaint. A trooper hopes for better luck next time, but does not not expect it. A trooper puts his or her own best interests aside in order to better serve the interests of others.
As I said, my mom is a trooper.
She married my dad when she was just 18 years old and spent the next seven years trying to get pregnant. After giving up virtually all hope, she became pregnant with my sister. Two years later, when she was 27, my mom’s father (my grandfather) died. The next year, she became pregnant with me. When she was 29, and I about a year old, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She endured radiation treatments and a radical mastectomy — rough stuff even now, but especially so back then. She did not even have the strength to pick me up and hold me for quite some time.
Later in life, she would watch her older sister die from cancer in her 50s and see her daughter (my sister) diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 35. Not long after that, my mom’s first grandchild (my daughter) was diagnosed with a heart defect that would require open heart surgery to repair shortly after her first birthday. Three years ago, my mom spent Christmas in the hospital with a baseball-sized aneurysm in the area between her neck and collarbone. When the intern at the hospital first saw it, he literally backed away in fear. The surgery performed to fix it was so new and so rare, the doctors asked my mom if they could write her case up in a medical journal. (Being a trooper, she said yes.)
The idea of being a trooper has been and continues to be a powerful one in my life — sometimes in good ways, sometimes less so. Most everybody likes a trooper and I like to be liked as much as the next guy. The challenge I have encountered is in taking trooper-dom to the extreme — or, perhaps more accurately, only halfway. For example, I am not very good at telling people what I want or need, which is classic trooper. But then I tend to get angry and disappointed when no one seems to be giving me what I want or need, which is not very trooper-like at all. Like my mom, I often hope for the best, but expect the worst. I also understand, however, that this is a fairly shitty way to go through life and have found, as well, that there is a fine line between hoping for the best and believing that you somehow do not DESERVE the best.
My mom had a colonoscopy today and my dad sent my sister and me an e-mail this afternoon letting us know that everything had gone well. “She handled it just like the trooper she is,” he wrote.
Tags: trooper
