Mother’s Day: Sensitive Warrior
Under the bivouac drops a stark mountain side, painted with the pale pinks and gray of a thin-air sunrise. My mom toggles through her options in the tent: camp stove, piton repair, rest, then clicks out onto the rock face to begin her ascent.
I’ve spent at least 30 hours watching her, Trye, Ves, and August play Cairn, a gorgeous indie mountaineering game with archaeological sites set into its cliff faces. While some people are chronically online, my mom is usually chronically outside, climbing real craggy rocks or frozen waterfalls. Badass. This spring is the first time I’ve even seen her play a video game. But it’s a good fit: stunning art, mountaineering, and an overlay of pictographs and artifacts. She studied archeology in college before heading West from Michigan with my dad to live by the Cascades.
In the time I’ve been couch-bound with an injured calf and achilles, she’s shifted from habitually inviting me on weekend hikes to dropping by with coffee or burrito bowls to play Cairn. She’ll invite our friend August (who started out as my friend and then also became her climbing buddy) or make plans with my partner.
When she’s not scrambling up a ridge, winning awards for leading in her work industry, or building a mountain bike trail with my dad in their backyard, my mom can be found painting, calling family, or plotting ways to share her adventures. Like when she found me a rental wheelchair after my kneecap split, then brought me out to ADA accessible trails to smell summer wildflowers. Or how she just surprised a friend with a weekend hiking Red Rocks outside Vegas. Or how she’s taken Katie and Kodjo out sailing.
My mom is the most generous person I know: I’ve literally seen her give the shirt off her back. She’s generous with her time, her knowledge, her gear, and her grace.
My favorite class while living in Hyderabad, India–the city my mom had warned me I should absolutely not study abroad in–was Islamic Art and Architecture in the Deccan. The Deccan region, essentially a triangle in the center of what’s now India, has a rich and fascinating history–and by rich, I mean sparkling with Golconda diamonds. For a period, Golconda was known as the center of wealth in the world. “Golconda” even became slang for rich. Art was carved into buildings, sung in live performances, dripping from every wall.
The professor who taught that class moonlights as a translator for archeology restoration projects. While I was in his class, his latest gig was reconstructing a palace garden by finding and translating poems throughout history that described the plants and water features. The divide between beauty and construction, beauty and science, beauty and strength, didn’t seem as obvious or inherent there as in the US, especially as our class was taught more about art history.
For much of the 17th and 18th centuries, Mughal portraiture bound sensitivity and strength. Portraits would depict leaders in profile, with one hand on their sword and the other raising a rose to their face or holding a booklet of poems. The first time I saw one, I thought of my mom.
When I left the University of Hyderabad early, dropping the semester a few weeks before finals for medical leave, my mom–who is (almost) always right–got me a flight to Abu Dhabi to meet her at a work conference and travel the rest of the way home. There’s her generosity again. But it’s founded in something fierce. My mom’s not just someone you want to share the good times with; she’s also the person I think of when the going gets tough (the tough get going).
My mom told me–while I was being bullied in middle school–that once she was suspended for a fight. The girl who’d been harassing her got physical one day and shoved her, so she fought back. When the vice principal pushed through the crowd and tried to pull her off–still swinging–she punched him in the face. She said that if one of her kids was ever suspended for defending themself, she’d take them on a celebratory vacation.
I never took her up on it, but knowing that I had a fighter in my corner re-instilled the courage and confidence that most kids lose when they’re hurt. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself yet, but she made it clear I was worth standing up for.
At a different ICANN conference–not Abu Dhabi, but London–I watched my mom beat back a man who tried to grope her on the street. She told me about how sexist the tech field is, about how GoDaddy used to hire models for their booth. Men would approach her–where she was working, just like them–with the expectation she’d been hired to look pretty and flirt with them. It was a constant battle against harassment and for recognition. And it’s not a battle she fought for just herself.
I overheard her talking to female staff once, prepping them for their first conferences: she talked to them about a new reporting process, and told them that if logging an incident didn’t work, they could find her to log a fist into the man’s face instead. She was upfront about what they could encounter, but made sure they knew it wasn’t acceptable, and that they don’t face it alone.
My mom’s welcoming attitude isn’t based on the assumption that all places are welcoming; it’s one bent on building a place that can welcome people–that can inspire people to build. She shows up with paints, a belay device, board games, a video game. She invites you to show up too. She makes it safe for you to arrive.
Her twin spirit of generosity and ferocity has its own gravity, grounding the people around her. It’s the biggest reason so many of my friends want to become hers. Holding a PlayStation controller and an ice axe instead of a rose and a sword, her hands are, to me, truly those of the sensitive warrior.
